Background

Germination Experiment:

As shown in (Figure 2 and Table 1), the more salt present, the fewer seeds germinated. The germination was not affected much up to 5 g/L salt to all the lines tested, but by 8 g/L the numbers started falling drastically and no seeds germinated in 20 g/L salt. More seeds from line 3 and line 4 germinated at 10 g/L than wild type while less (when only looking at average) or similar (when considering the standard error) amount of seeds germinated from line 1 and 2 as wild type (Graph 1). Overall, line 3 and line 4 showed higher germination rates than the wild type while lines 1 and 2 had similar germination rates to wild type. Although about half of the seeds germinated in 8 or 10 g/L salt, the roots of those seeds were much shorter than and not as well developed as those germinated in salt solution less than 5 g/L (Figure 3). Also, the roots of all four transgenic seeds germinated in 8 g/L were better developed than roots of wild type seeds, suggesting the transgenic lines did better than wild type under salt stressed condition (Figure 4).

Vegetative Growth Experiment:

The same growth trend was observed in both the wild type and the four transgenic lines; that is, the higher concentration of salt in the soil, the smaller the plant size (Figure 5). At 20g/L the weight of all plants was less than 10% of control weight of plants growing in 0 g/L salt (Table 2). At 0g/L the transgenic lines do not seem to affect growth much. Although this data is limited to the sample size, starting with 5g/L the transgenic lines all performed better than the wild-type plants (Table2, Figure 6). Both the fresh weight of shoots (Graph 2 and Table 2) and the early-flowering plants (Figure 7) indicated that the transgenic lines performed better than the Wt Westar when the plants grew in soil at salt concentration 5 g/L and higher.