Wheat plants become very sensitive to salt when they flower.
This makes a lot of the world s surface unsuitable for wheat growing. Sometime the soil itself may be too salty, and in dry countries where crops are irrigated, the brackish water used for watering may kill the wheat. So scientists at the John Innes Centre on Norwich Research Park set out to develop a new salt-tolerant cereal. They began with Sand couch, a wild grass found on the edges of the Black Sea, which can tolerate salt levels that are up to 70 per cent of those found in sea water. Their aim was to introduce the salt-tolerant characteristics from Sand couch into the two wheat species used for making pasta and bread.