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Many Australian native plants, notably saltbush, like salty soils. Some salt-loving plants are useful for food and forage. However, production of our staple food crops – wheat and rice – is greatly reduced by salty soils. Rana will end the talk describing research by her team at CSIRO Plant Industry that found new genes for salt tolerance that improved the yield of durum wheat in saline soil.
Dr Rana Munns has recently ‘retired’ from CSIRO and holds a joint appointment as honorary fellow at CSIRO and professor in the school of plant biology at the University of Western Australia. She has worked on ways that important crop plants can adapt to dry or saline soils, as drought and soil salinity are problems that are increasing in magnitude throughout the world, as well as in Australia. She is editor of a plant science journal (Functional Plant Biology) and a free on-line plant science textbook: Plants in Action