Abstract
Thellungiella halophila has been identified as a model system for understanding abiotic stress tolerance, and it shows extreme salt tolerance. Thellungiella is closely related to Arabidopsis, and its genes show 90% identity to those of Arabidopsis. Recently, full-length cDNA library with a total of 9,569 unique genes were constructed from Thellungiella plants treated with salinity, cold, freezing stresses or ABA treatment. A novel gain-of-function system using ectopic expression of full-length cDNAs, termed the FOX hunting system (Full-length cDNA Over-eXpressing gene hunting system) was developed. In this study, we are carrying out the FOX hunting using 374 Thellungiella transcription factors to identify genes conferring salt tolerance to Arabidpsis plants.