Salinity is an important environmental constraint to crop productivity in arid and semiarid regions of the world. The evaluation of the responses to salinity of different Arabidopsis ecotypes or transgenic lines is important to identify and investigate the role of different key genes. These new characterized genes involved in the response to salinity stress are of great interest to be incorporated in crops breeding programs. Here we provide a reproducible method to evaluate the performance of Arabidopsis lines to salinity stress by analysing primary and lateral root growth and fresh weight of plants grown under in vitro conditions in growth chambers. Even though NaCl is the most frequent used salinity tests, other salts (e.g. KCl, MgCl2) can be also evaluated by this method. Arabidopsis plants can be maintained for 15-20 days in these conditions, although effects on growth and biomass can be observed, depending on the used salt and concentration, within the first 10 days.

We gratefully acknowledge funding through grants from Instituto Nacional de Investigación y Tecnología Agraria y Alimentaria (INIA; project numbers: 2009-0004-C01, 2012-0008-C01) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (project number: BIO2010-14871 and ERA-NET GEN2006-27772-C2-2).

Peer reviewed