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Associating primary and specialized metabolism with salt induced osmotic stress tolerance in maize.

The combined factors of a growing human population, environmental deterioration and increased competition for land is leading to an ever-increasing demand for more resilient crops. One of the greatest concerns for future agriculture is the dramatic increase in the exposure of arable land to salinity. Given this fact, a sizeable research effort has been made into understanding the mechanisms underpinning salinity tolerance in a wide range of species. However, despite the considerable success that has been made with the identification of a number of quantitative trait loci regulating Na homeostasis and tolerance to salt induced osmotic stress, these remain only partially understoodmost likely due to the complexity of the salt induced osmotic response (Munns &Tester, 2008). In this issue ofNewPhytologist, Liang et al. (2021; pp. 2355– 2370) tackled this complexity by performing a comprehensive metabolite profiling of 266 maize inbred lines and thereby identifying 37 metabolic markers of salt stress tolerance. They subsequently carried out metabolite genome wide association studies (mGWASs), identifying and validating three genes associated with metabolism as playing important roles in this process.