Iodine Does Not Enhance The Stress Tolerance But Affects The Chemical Composition Of Lettuce Plants Grown Under Salt Stress

Biofortification is "the process by which the nutritional quality of food crops is improved through agronomic practices, conventional plant breeding, or modern biotechnology" without sacrificing important culinary characteristics and key agronomic traits, such as pest resistance, drought resistance, and yield (World Health Organization, 2016). Recent studies report evidences for a nutritional role of iodine in plants (Kiferle et al., 2021) and a growing number of studies show positive effects of iodine on plant growth (see Medrano-Macías et al., 2016) and stress tolerance (Medrano-Macías et al., 2021). Thus, the fertilization with iodine could be a way to biofortificate plants with positive outcomes on human health since iodine is an essential element in the human diet and its deficiency can lead to many iodine deficiency disorders. Among different crops, lettuce has an enormous economic importance worldwide and is considered moderately sensitive to salinity with a threshold for electrical conductivity of 1.3 dS m-1 ; the iodine biofortification might improve the salt tolerance and the nutritional quality of lettuce plants. In the present study, lettuce plants were grown with iodized salt to evaluate the influence of iodine on plant growth and on tissue chemical composition under salt stress.