What is it about?
We explore how some salt-tolerant plants "sweat" in order to survive salty conditions. We use Nolana mollis, a shrub native to the Atacama Desert that is persistently covered in a salty brine despite living in the world's driest desert, as our model system. The success of N. mollis and other salt-secreting plants relies on their ability to desalinate their water through secretion of the brine on their leaf surfaces. We show how the cracking of the waxy cuticle that covers the leaf surface must be constrained to allow salt removal without catastrophically drying the plant out.
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Why is it important?
Many salt-tolerant plants eliminate unwanted salt through gland-mediated secretion onto their leaf surfaces. Efforts to understand and manipulate this process typically focus on the optimization and regulation of ion transporters but often neglect its biomechanical and energetic underpinnings. By exploring the physical determinants of secretory salt tolerance, our work offers insights into alternative approaches for engineering salt-tolerant agriculture or bio-inspired desalination devices.
Perspectives
Nolana mollis is a weird and charismatic plant: though living in the world's driest desert, it's persistently covered in a wet, salty film, called brine. This is borne out of the fundamental principle that plants cannot run away from their problems. N. mollis's only consistent source of water is deep, but salty groundwater, which it desalinates through secretion of this surface brine. N. mollis is strikingly successful in its natural habitat, growing verdantly and in abundance, almost constantly flowering, and growing to meters in diameter. It owes its success to the structure of its salt gland and the material properties of the cuticle that envelops it. It was among the highlights of my graduate work to work with this beautiful plant. The paper, however, is not specific to N. mollis and explores other salt-secreting plants. The biggest-picture message of this paper is that, even though plants are structurally constrained to be rooted in their environments, they still adapt their structure and architecture to be able to respond to their conditions.
Melissa Mai
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Secreting salt glands constrain cuticle fracture to enhance desalination efficiency, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2505598122.
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