Salt Tolerant Crops Earn Award for California Researcher
A UC Davis professor has earned national recognition for developing tomatoes that can survive in salty water. The discovery could potentially restore hundreds of thousands of acres of lost farmland. Eduardo Blumwald was selected for the Alexander von Humboldt award, an honor given to the person deemed to have made the largest contribution to American agriculture in the past five years. It was Blumwaldąs work engineering a groundbreaking new tomato that promises to thrive in salty water and simultaneously restore salty soil that earned him the award. It includes a $15,000 prize and a $5,000 scholarship for an agriculture student.
Salt is a major agricultural problem in both soil and water. It is a major inhibitor to plant growth. The chair of Blumwald’s department said he did not see another development that rivals Blumwald’s. Though Blumwald said he has long been interested in how some plants adapt to grow in otherwise inhospitable conditions, it was only recently that he began to make breakthroughs in salt-tolerant crops. In 1999, Blumwald announced that he and a team of researchers could create a salt-tolerant plant by engineering the genes of the Arabidopsis plant. The team had encouraged the plant to produce more of the protein responsible for funneling salt out of water in the roots and placing it in compartments of the cells in the leaves, separate from the rest of the plant. This allows the fruit of the plant to develop more fully than would normally be possible in salt water.
By 2001, the technique had led to the development of a genetically engineered, salt-tolerant tomato. Much agricultural soil suffers from high salinity levels as a result of years of irrigation. Some estimates claim as much as 50,000 acres of world farmland are lost daily to salt buildup. If the salt could be easily removed, as the tomato promises to do, it would eventually reopen hundreds of thousands of acres to renewed production. Despite the potentially controversial nature of his work, Blumwald said he has had only occasional run-ins with activists opposed to genetically engineered food. “I think they leave [the research team] alone because the tomato has environmental benefits too,” Blumwald said, referring to its ability to restore farmland. “They stay away because it is easy to see the holes in their argument.” (California Aggie, 7/14/03 via AgNet).
