Salt stress—which can be triggered by high salt concentrations in a plant’s environment—can significantly affect plant growth and crop production by influencing photosynthesis and the absorption of water and nutrients.

Reporter genes are a type of protein-coding gene that are often tagged to a gene of interest. Once inside a target cell, reporter genes usually produce visually identifiable characteristics like fluorescence and luminescence when expressed along with the gene of interest. Thus, reporter genes “report” the presence or absence of genes of interest in an organism, determine the gene expression pattern, or track the physical location of a DNA segment or protein in the cell.
Commonly used reporter...