The use of 24 markers on chromosome 1 which were outside the Saltol region was enough to provided adequate information to select introgression lines with minimal donor background. In a similar research, between 7 and 13 markers on chromosome 1 were successfully used to select introgression lines with minimal donor background [33] and [34]. When we consider map distances between markers as the basis for estimating the extent of allele’s introgressed from each of the parent in the ILs, it can be observed that the recurrent parent had the longest distance of 102.2 Mb, while the donor distance was 13.6 Mb (Fig. 3 and Supplementary Fig. 1). On average, 81% of the recurrent parent genome alleles were noted in the ILs, while the donor parent genome had 11.5. These results demonstrated the effectiveness of MAS to breed salt tolerant version of a popular cultivar in a short period.