Water Technology
Saline Agriculture
Sciperio is examining the problem of saltwater irrigation on a genetic level.
Water purification, reclamation and desalination are important approaches to the looming water crisis, but not the only ones. With 80% of the water used for agriculture, another approach to the efficient use of water is by using saltwater and/or brine for agriculture irrigation. With an estimated 20% of the world’s cultivated land and up to half of all irrigated lands currently affected by salinity (a figure expected to worsen in the future) making the most and best use of water for agricultural purposes will become increasingly important.
Exploring Salt Tolerance Mechanisms
While there are plants, such as mangrove, which can survive and even thrive in saline soils, and their mechanisms of salt tolerance have been associated with general plant stress, the mechanisms themselves are still poorly understood. As functional genomic studies begin to unravel the complex physiology involved in plant stress responses, it is becoming clear that a battery of stress response genes are involved, and that many of these are common to most stress responses.
We are in the exploration phase of using a combinatorial genomics approach with high transfection efficiencies to study salt-tolerant plants or non-plant organisms as a source of novel genes and pathways related to salinity and other stress tolerance. In essence, we are trying to make the plants survive under saline conditions, and then implement this knowledge across multiple-scale agricultural applications. It's an approach that offers remarkable potential.
Sciperio and its collaborators are working to address this serious humanitarian issue by developing innovative, reliable, and effective water reclamation, desalination, and extraction technologies along with novel methods to understand salt tolerance for saline agriculture – the largest consumer of water.