saline-agriculture
Saline agriculture is the practice of cultivating crops in salt-affected soils or using saline water for irrigation, requiring plants with specialized physiological adaptations to survive osmotic stress and ion toxicity. As soil salinization threatens an increasing share of the world's arable land, understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms that enable salt tolerance is a critical area of plant science research. Identifying and engineering these traits offers a path toward sustaining food production in degraded or coastal environments.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-04-13
A soil fungus naturally found in salt-tolerant coastal plants can be applied to corn seedlings to help them survive salty soils, boosting growth by up to 45% under high-salt conditions by reprogramming the plant's internal chemistry.
Corn seedlings inoculated with the fungus grew 25% heavier, 45% taller, and had 16% longer roots under high-salt stress (250 mM NaCl) compared to untreated salt-stressed plants.
The fungus boosted the potassium-to-sodium ratio in corn shoots and roots by 45% and 68% respectively, directly reducing the toxic buildup of sodium inside plant tissues.
Even without salt stress, the fungus improved corn seedling fresh weight by 13%, plant height by 9%, and root length by 19% by activating plant growth hormone pathways.
