What are we doing next? We aim to further study the genetics and mechanisms of the identified whitefly resistance and test the stability of identified resistant accessions in the field – a project of PhD student @Erin Rini.

These experiments were financially supported by the Delta’s under pressure and Deltas: salinity and drought projects (KB35 Food Security and Valuing Water program—project numbers KB-35-001-001 and KB-35-101-002)—funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Safety, the Netherlands.

We also measured the phytohormones ABA, JA, and SA, and saw differences between a resistant and a susceptible accession, but the cause for increased susceptibility is not clear yet.

Susceptibility to whitefly increased when pepper plants experienced salt stress.

We also saw difference between accessions for whitefly survival and reproduction, and identified four accessions with low survival of whiteflies that are potentially resistant.

We saw an effect of salt on plant growth, which depended on accession.

In this paper, we ask how Capsicum plants would cope under a double stress, in our case whitefly infestation and salt stress. We used 25 Capsicum accessions, from four different species, and grew the plants for 3 weeks with and without a salt treatment, and then performed a whitefly assay.