Poster: Salinity

Abs # 155: Creating salt- and drought-tolerant cotton by over-expressing the arabidopsis antiporter protein AtNHX1.

Presenter:	He, Cixin , cixin.he@ttu.edu
Authors	He, Cixin  (A)   Yan, Juqiang  (A)   Wang, Jing  (A)   Blumwald, Eduardo  (B)   Zhang, Hong  (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Texas Tech University (B): University of California at Davis

Cotton is the most important crop in West Texas, but its production is severely limited by the harsh environmental conditions such as salinity and drought. Overexpression of AtNHX1, a vacuolar Na⁺/H⁺ antiporter from Arabidopsis thaliana, in Arabidopsis (Apse et al 1999), tomatoes (Zhang and Blumwald, 2001), and Brassica napus (Zhang et al, 2001) conferred to higher salt tolerance, suggesting the possibility of creating other crops with increased salt and drought tolerance using similar approach. The gene AtNHX1 was therefore fused to the 35S promoter of the intermediate vector pRTL2, and then inserted into the binary vector pCGN1578, which was finally transformed into the agrobacterium GV3010 for cotton transformation. Cotton callus was generated at frequency between 35% and 60% from batch to batch, yet embryo regeneration was the limiting step in obtaining transgenic cotton plants. We have now obtained more than 15 independent transgenic lines that are resistant to Kanamycin based the “leaf-smearing” assay developed in our laboratory. The molecular confirmation of transgenic cotton by PCR is on going and biochemical and physiological analysis of transgenic cotton will be presented at the meeting.