Abstract

Author:
Swastika Bhandari, Amir Pandit, Roshan Gajurel, Pratibha Paudel

Doi: 10.26480/sfna.02.2024.92.104

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

Crops face moisture stress during the germination and early seedling stages. Seed priming has proved to be an effective technique to resolve the issue. With the objective of studying the effect of gibberellic acid (GA) on germination and early seedling growth of three crops under drought conditions, a two-factor factorial experiment was conducted with a completely randomized design with the replicates for three crops separately. The drought factors were three different levels (no stress, moderate stress (0.5 MPa) and severe stress (1.5 MPa) environments using NaCl) and methods of priming (GA-100 ppm) and hydropriming as control) on rice, black gram and rape seed at Agronomy lab of Lamjung Campus. Number of seeds germinated each day were counted and the root and shoot length were also measured till the 13th day. The results revealed that seed germination was sensitive to drought stress, as the mean germination time, germination index, seedling vigor index, coefficient of velocity of germination and seedling length with increasing stress in each crop (P-0.05) However, hydro-priming and Gibberellic Acid (GA), showed no significant difference in any parameters of any crops under various stress conditions Thus, hydropriming is suggested to overcome stress effects and further research with different concentrations of GA, with different priming period can be carried out to overcome the stress situations irrespective of the starch, protein, and lipid content of the seeds.