Engineering salt-tolerant Brassica plants: Characterization of yield and seed oil quality in transgenic plants with increased vacuolar sodium accumulation

Transgenic Brassica napus plants overexpressing AtNHX1, a vacuolar Na+/H+ a ntiport from Arabidopsis thaliana, were able to grow, flower, and produce s eeds in the presence of 200 mM sodium chloride. Although the transgenic pla nts grown in high salinity accumulated sodium up to 6% of their dry weight, growth of the these plants was only marginally affected by the high salt c oncentration. Moreover, seed yields and the seed oil quality were not affec ted by the high salinity of the soil. Our results demonstrate the potential use of these transgenic plants for agricultural use in saline soils. Our f indings, showing that the modification of a single trait significantly impr oved the salinity tolerance of this crop plant, suggest that with a combina tion of breeding and transgenic plants it could be possible to produce salt -tolerant crops with far fewer target traits than had been anticipated.