Nature Biotechnology
19, 765 - 768 (2001)
doi:10.1038/90824
Transgenic salt-tolerant tomato plants accumulate salt in foliage but not in fruitHong-Xia Zhang1
& Eduardo Blumwald1, 21
Department of Botany, University of Toronto, 25 Willcocks St., Toronto, ON M5S 3B2, Canada. 2
Department of Pomology, University of California, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616.
Correspondence should be addressed to Eduardo Blumwald eblumwald@ucdavis.eduTransgenic tomato plants overexpressing a vacuolar Na+/H+ antiport were able to grow, flower, and produce fruit in the presence of 200 mM sodium chloride. Although the leaves accumulated high sodium concentrations, the tomato fruit displayed very low sodium content. Contrary to the notion that multiple traits introduced by breeding into crop plants are needed to obtain salt-tolerant plants, the modification of a single trait significantly improved the salinity tolerance of this crop plant. These results demonstrate that with a combination of breeding and transgenic plants it could be possible to produce salt-tolerant crops with far fewer target traits than had been anticipated. The accumulation of sodium in the leaves and not in the fruit demonstrates the utility of such a modification in preserving the quality of the fruit.
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