High levels of soil salinity affect the performance of chickpea and other salt sensitive crops in many parts of the world, including farming land in Australia and India. The APPF’s high-throughput phenotyping platform at The Plant Accelerator will be used in June 2014 to screen 1,056 chickpea plants to determine traits associated with salinity stress response in chickpea. Physiological and genotypic information of the phenotyped plants will enable the identification of QTL controlling aspects of salinity tolerance in chickpea. In the long term, this will support breeding programs developing salt tolerant chickpea varieties.
The project undertaken by Dr Tim Sutton’s group at the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics (ACPFG) on the University of Adelaide’s Waite Campus is part of a large scale AISRF funded collaboration involving research groups at SARDI, the University of Western Australia, India Consortium, RMIT University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland.
