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Soil salinity among other abiotic stresses is a major threat to cultivated land. Breeding salt tolerant cultivars has always been thought to be an effective and cheaper way to overcome salinity problem. Salt tolerant and salt sensitive wheat accessions were hybridized to develop genetic material to investigate inheritance of salt tolerance based on early seedling, adult plant and physiological responses. Salt tolerance in low salinity appeared to be a complex polygenic trait. However, genetic models for most responses were poor fit in high salinity and suggested further investigations. Differences in gene expressions in different NaCl concentrations appeared to be due to different gene regulation or interaction and/or involvement of additional or hidden genes. Both additive and non-additive gene effects required to be considered while designing of breeding programme for improving salt tolerance in wheat and in the statistical model used to find QTL for the salt tolerance. This QTL couple with recurrent selection for specific combining ability of the 4WLRG/1-8 with an excellent cultivar of wheat appears to be a good salt tolerant breeding strategy. © 2014 Friends Science Publishers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

WRKY transcription factors are a large family in higher plants, play significant functions in plant growth and stress response, such as plant development, metabolism, and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. In this study, we identified one WRKY transcription factor gene GmWRKY111 from soybean with an open reading frame of 1197 bp encoding 398 amino acids with a molecular weight of 44 kD and a pI of 5.7. Analysis of expression profiles GmWKRY111 highly expressed in root at differential growth period, and weakly expressed in flower, stem and leaf, and significantly responded to 200 mM NaCl. In addition, the multiple alignments analysis indicated that GmWRKY111 possessed a conserved WRKYGQK domain and a zinc-finger structure; the phylogenetic tree analysis showed that GmWRKY111 belongs to group IIc clade. Meanwhile, Over-expression of the GmWRKY111 improved seedling tolerance to salt in composite transgenic soybean plants. These results indicate that GmWRKY111 improves the ability of plant to confer salt tolerance. Further studies are needed to explore its interaction with other proteins and explore the pathway in which it is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]