This investigation is a mimesis to what usually happens in nature, where the
plants are normally exposed to sublethal environmental stresses before their
exposure to the lethal level of stresses.
The gradual increase of environmental stress, gives
plants a suffficient time
to prepare their defensive means to withstand the lethal level of stress. In order
to develope a suitable screening technique, it was essential to determine the
induction as well as the lethal levels of stress, as important components of such
proposed tool.
This technique was applied to screen some tomato genotypes, and assess the
genetic variability among them, in order to evaluate their salinity stress
response , and selecting the highly salt tolerant types.