Email: Jack.Walker2@nottingham.ac.uk Surbhi.Grewal@nottingham.ac.uk

Soil salinization negatively effects plant growth. Twenty percent of cultivated land and thirty-three percent of irrigated land are salt affected and degraded. To increase food security, an increase in food production on saline soils is particularly important. Bread wheat is slightly salt tolerant, however several of its wild relatives are highly salt tolerant, particularly Thinopyrum species.

In this work, a high throughput hydroponic system for screening salt tolerance was established to assess the salt tolerance of wheat and its wild relatives during the vegetative growth stage. This system exposed plants to varying levels of salt stress over approximately three weeks, upon where the shoot dry weight, tiller number, SPAD values and ion content in leaf was recorded.

During high salt stress, Thinopyrum species and Thinopyrum addition lines outperformed wheat in terms of whole shoot dry weight, low leaf sodium content, SPAD values and tiller number.

This screening system will be employed in the future to screen for salt tolerance in introgression lines developed at the WRC, primarily focusing on Thinopyrum linkage group 5, which have demonstrated a superior ability to tolerate salt stress.