A Short Review on the Development of Salt Tolerant Cultivars in Rice

Rice is staple food for half of the world. With a population of almost 9.6billion by the year 2050, there is a dire need of developing techniques toimprove the crop plants, not only in terms of better yield but also towithst and harsh environmental conditions and stresses like drought,temperature, flood and salinity. Salinity is second to drought stress and henceit is very important to develop crops tolerant to salinity stress. This reviewdiscusses the mechanisms of salt tolerance and the recent developments in understanding the complex tolerance phenomena. One way to address the salinity issue is to develop tolerant rice varieties using conventional andmodern breeding techniques for which screening the rice germplasm for thevarieties with desired traits is critical. Conventional methods to developtolerant rice varieties are discussed along with modern biotechnologytechniques are also discussed. Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) and MarkerAssisted Selection (MAS) are promising techniques. In addition to thesemodern techniques, some recent developments in the fields of transgenicplants, haploid breeding and Somaclonal variations have also been discussed.The limited knowledge about molecular and genetic mechanisms to tolerateabiotic stresses however is a barrier to efficiently develop tolerant cultivars.A combination of conventional and modern biotechnology techniques couldpossibly open up the new ways.