Unravelling salt stress tolerance: physiological, morphological and genetic components in crop species and model plants

Abstract

This PhD Thesis address fundamental mechanisms of salt stress response in plants from an agronomic, physiological, morphological and genetic point of view. Specifically we considered salt stress tolerance performances of eleven wild species of Cruciferae, closely related to Arabidopsis thaliana (Chapter 1). In the second chapter, salt tolerance has been related to main morphological and physiological traits of two cultivars of sweet basil (Genovese and Napoletano). Finally (Chapter 3) we considered how salinity stress tolerance of tomato may be affected by a constitutive over-expression of genes involved in wounding responses. Part of this research has been conducted at Purdue University (Indiana - USA) and at the experimental station of the University of Bologna, located in Teresina (PI – Brazil).