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Increasing soil salinity is posing major threat to growth and production of crop
plants throughout the world, specifically in the regions of arid and semi-arid
climate. Salinity is one of the most important environmental factors affecting
the 25% irrigated land of Pakistan and limiting the crop production of the
important agricultural crops i.e. maize and wheat. Projects dealing with the
physiological mechanisms behind growth reduction in crop plants under actual
saline conditions are limited. Although there is enough literature to understand
the ionic disturbance under salt stress at tissue level still there is need to
investigate the subcellular localization of ions and proteins to understand the
mechanism behind the plant growth reduction.
Pakistan has around 20.8 million hectare cultivatable area out of which around
5.33 million hectare area has already been degraded by alone salinity,
however, waterlogging has affected around 1.55 million hectares. Large tracts
of land in the areas of Hafizabad, Gojra, Faisalabad, Kohat, Mardan, Multan,
Muzaffargarh, Toba Tek Singh, Shorkot, Layya, Rahim Yar Khan, Mardan,
Kohat and Charsadda are unsuitable for cultivation because of salinity and
sodicity. Moreover, characterization of saline soils in Mardan and Kohat
located in Khyber Pukhtankhwa (KPK) province will be done under this project.
This proposed project will be the first to deal with the investigation of apoplastic
Na+ and growth-related proteins in plants growing under actual saline soils.
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