Physiological and transcriptomic evaluation of salt tolerance in Egyptian tomato landraces at the seedling stage

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is an essential vegetable crop with a wonder fruit used as a good source for human food and health-promoting worldwide. Drought, water salinity, and soil salinity are the commonly known environmental factors that can limit the productivity of various crops between 30% and 50% of final yields. To counter these previous effects, scientists have focused their research on studying how tomato plants at different development stages behave under various saline environmental conditions.

In this study, we used bioinformatics analysis tools to identify the putative genes that are related to salt tolerance in tomatoes based on the percentage of similarity with salt tolerance genes from soybean, rice, wheat, barley, Arabidopsis and other plants. Within these, 254 genes were identified as putatively involved in salt tolerance in tomatoes. Furthermore, the putative tissue expression pattern of these genes under different times from various abiotic stresses was analyzed. Also, the Expression Cube tool was used to predict the putative expression of our target genes at various tissues in fruit development. Then we study the effect of various concentrations from Sodium chloride (NaCl) at different times on the behavior of two Egyptian tomato genotypes through estimate the physiological and metabolic changes such as; soluble sugars, glucose, fructose, total chlorophyll, chlorophyll a, and chlorophyll b contents. Moreover, the relative expression levels of salt tolerance genes in tomato SlAAO3, SlABCG22, SlABF3, SlALDH22A1, SlAPX2, SlAVP1, SlCYP175A, SlNHO1, SlP5CS, SlPIP1, SlTPS1 and SlUGE-1, were investigated in both tomato genotypes under various concentrations from salt tolerance in comparison with the wild-type plants.

At the end, bioinformatics tools help in the determination of novel genes in tomato that related with tomato plant response to salt stresses. Finally, the findings reported in this article are helpful to assess the two Egyptian tomato genotypes and for understanding the roles of candidate genes for tolerance to saline conditions. And offering insights into future using these genes for generating stress-resistant tomatoes and improving agricultural sustainability.