HKT1;1 and HKT1;2 Na Transporters from Play Different Roles in the Plant Na Distribution under Salinity.

Salt tolerance is a target trait in plant science and tomato breeding programs. Wild tomato accessions have been often explored for this purpose. Since shoot Na/K is a key component of salt tolerance, RNAi-mediated knockdown isogenic lines obtained for alleles encoding both class I Na transporters HKT1;1 and HKT1;2 were used to investigate the silencing effects on the Na and K contents of the xylem sap, and source and sink organs of the scion, and their contribution to salt tolerance in all 16 rootstock/scion combinations of non-silenced and silenced lines, under two salinity treatments. The results show that SgHKT1;1 is operating differently from SgHKT1;2 regarding Na circulation in the tomato vascular system under salinity. A model was built to show that using silenced line as rootstock would improve salt tolerance and fruit quality of varieties carrying the wild type allele. Moreover, this increasing effect on both yield and fruit soluble solids content of silencing could explain that a low expressing variant was fixed in during domestication, and the paradox of increasing agronomic salt tolerance through silencing the allele from , a salt adapted species.