TITLE:
Assessing Influence of Ozone in Tomato Seed Dormancy Alleviation
AUTHORS:
N. Sudhakar, D. Nagendra-Prasad, N. Mohan, Bradford Hill, M. Gunasekaran, K. Murugesan
KEYWORDS:
Abscissic Acid, Germination, Ozone, Tomato Seed
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Plant Sciences,
Vol.2 No.3,
September
30,
2011
ABSTRACT: The study was made on the role of ozone (O3) gas treatment on seeds of Lycopersicon esculentum cv. PKM1 (tomato) to release dormancy in advance. The experimental conditions followed a complete factorial design with 3 independent factors, i.e. A faster start of germination in T2 treatment (98% - 99%) was observed than in other treatments (T1, T3 and T4) compared to control seeds by measuring seedling growth rate on 5th day after treatment. Never the less a too long and high concentration of O3 treatment seemed to be penalizing on germination rate whereas low O3 concentration (T2) for a moderate time interval (20 min) seemed to be most beneficial. The treated seeds were stored, checked 1, 3, 6 months later and found that, the seeds have retained their accelerated germination efficiency. In particular 1T2 (1 month storage), 3T2 (3 month storage) had maximum germination rate among all the stored treated seeds, but 6T2 (6 month storage) didn’t show sustained germination acceleration efficiency. Therefore it was found that when time prolongs, O3 treatment loss its effect steadily and the germination efficiency of all the treatments are more or less same at six months after treatment. It is hypothesized that the application of O3 acts as an important phenomenon in accelerating seed germination by breaking the dormancy in advance which is associated with reduced level of ABA in O3 treated seeds.