One of the goals in our research center is to improve the use of land and water for agriculture, particularly in arid or semi-arid regions, which represent 46% of the land available on Earth. Salinity is one of the most important problems in today’s agriculture, especially in arid zones. My research is focused on studying wild relatives of tomato to find tolerance to salinity stress.
Currently, the world’s food production relies in a few crop species that have been domesticated. In most cases, the domesticated crops include only a fraction of the genetic diversity found within the species. Wild relatives from domesticated crops represent an unexploited source of genes that could be useful for crop improvement. In the past, only few of these wild relatives have been explored, and their use for breeding has been hindered by the lack of genetic and phenotypic information. However, we now have the advanced technology suitable to explore these resources.