Journal of Plant Process and Function

As salinity is becoming a major threat to the agricultural production in the arid and semi-arid parts of the world, exploring salt resistant genotypes for different crop plants, including chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), is a very important task. Thus, in a 3-replicated completely randomized factorial pot experiment, six chickpea genotypes (i.e. Arman, Khorram-Abad, Nour-Abad, Hashem, Azad and ILC-482) were subjected to four levels of NaCl salt (i.e. 0, 25, 50 and 75 mM) at the Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran. Results indicated that the increased salinity led to increases in shoot Na⁺ and K⁺ concentrations, decreases in days to flowering and maturity, Ca⁺² concentration, plant height, capsules/plant, seeds/casule, seed weight/plant, dry mass/plant and harvest indices of all genotypes, though in different extents. Genotype ILC-482 was found to indicate smaller increases in shoot Na⁺ concentration and Na⁺/K⁺ ratio and smaller decreases in plant height, capsules/plant, seeds/capsule, seed weight/plant, dry mass/plant and harvest index, when grown at the presence of salt. Our findings suggest that even moderate levels of salt (e.g. 50 and 75 mM) are potent to impose notable depressions in growth and grain yield attributes of chickpea. Though, genotype ILC-482 seems to be more salt tolerant at least relative to the remaining of examined genotypes.