In recognition of his research on salt-tolerant crops, plant biologist Eduardo Blumwald of the University of California, Davis, has been selected to receive the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Award.

The award, named after the 19th-century German naturalist and geographer, has been presented annually since 1975 to one individual who is considered to have made the most significant contribution to American agriculture during the previous five years. It includes a $15,000 cash prize and the $5,000 Alfred Toepfer Scholarship, which enables a UC Davis student to study agriculture in Europe.

A public award ceremony and seminar by Blumwald, a professor in UC Davis' Department of Pomology, will be held in September at UC Davis.

Blumwald's research career has focused on how plants respond and adapt to harsh environmental conditions such as drought, cold, and salty soils or water. During the past decade, he has concentrated on the impact of salinity on crops.

Salty irrigation water damages most plants by upsetting their ability to take in water through their root cells. If salt concentrations are very high, flow of water into the plant is actually reversed and the plant dehydrates and dies as water is drawn out of its cells.

Blumwald and colleagues studied a naturally occurring protein known as a "sodium/proton antiporter," which uses energy available in the plant cells to move salts into compartments within the cells. Once the salt is stashed inside these compartments -- called vacuoles -- it is isolated from the rest of the cell and unable to interfere with the plant's normal biochemical activity.

In 1999 Blumwald and colleagues announced that they had manipulated the gene that governs production of the antiporter protein and were able to genetically engineer salt tolerance in the Arabidopsis plant, a cabbage relative that is commonly used in plant research. Continued research in this area led to the 2001 announcement of a genetically engineered tomato plant that thrives in salty irrigation water. The discoveries were published in the journals Science and Nature Biotechnology.

Blumwald is continuing this research in hopes of developing other salt-tolerant crops that will be useful for agricultural production in areas of the world that have salty irrigation water and salt-damaged soils. His work has drawn international interest both from industry and government agricultural agencies.

Blumwald began this research at the University of Toronto and continued it after coming to UC Davis in 2000. While in Canada he also was awarded the 1995 Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

Two other UC Davis faculty members, Bruce Hammock of the entomology and environmental toxicology departments and the late Charles Rick of the vegetable crops department, also received the von Humboldt award for agriculture in 1995 and 1993, respectively.