wrote in message
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In article ,
Phred wrote:
ISTR talk of some plants actually excreting excess salt (NaCl) as one
method of tolerating saline conditions. Also, don't some plants
actively excrete excess water in the process known as "gutation"?

IIRC, some plants adapted to the seaside do excrete salt, or actually
salty water this way. Others can store salt in cell vacuoles.

Many plants will guttate pure water under appropriate conditions: wet
soil and high humidity.

Recently a genetic engineering project at U of Toronto and UC Davis
produced salinity-resistant tomato plants that had a
store-salt-in-vacuoles
method from hm, could it be Arabidopsis? Maybe not. At any rate, with
so much arable land losing its productivity from salinity increase due
to irrigation, crop plants modified like this can be very useful. Also
the possibility of irrigation or hydroponics with partly desalinated
seawater is promising for some coastal arid regions. AFAIK, this is a
fairly hot topic in crop research.

And what about the idea for a genetically modified floating seaweed - like
the notorious Water Hyacinth - to float on the surface of the world's oceans
producing some sort of edible or industrial oil which is easily cropped my
mechanical harvesters. No fertilizers or soils needed.
Surely some one is working on this idea.