Germination and First Stages of Growth in Drought, Salinity, and Cold Stress Conditions of Plasma-Treated Barley Seeds

Abstract

Numerous works have demonstrated that cold plasma treatments constitute an effective procedure to accelerate seed germination under nonstress conditions. Evidence also exists about a positive effect of plasmas for germination under environmental stress conditions. For barley seeds, this work studies the influence of cold plasma treatments on the germination rate and initial stages of plant growth in common stress environments, such as drought, salinity, and low-temperature conditions. As a general result, it has been found that the germination rate was higher for plasma-treated than for untreated seeds. Plasma also induced favorable changes in plant and radicle dimensions, which depended on the environment. The obtained results demonstrate that plasma affects the biochemical metabolic chains of seeds and plants, resulting in changes in the concentration of biochemical growing factors, a faster germination, and an initially more robust plant growth, even under stress conditions. These changes in phenotype are accompanied by differences in the concentration of biomarkers such as photosynthetic pigments (chlorophylls a and b and carotenoids), reactive oxygen species, and, particularly, the amino acid proline in the leaves of young plants, with changes that depend on environmental conditions and the application of a plasma treatment. This supports the idea that, rather than an increase in seed water imbibition capacity, there are clear beneficial effects on seedling of plasma treatments.

Germination and Growth Characteristics of nud Knockout and win1 Knockout Barley Lines under Salt Stress

“…The laboratory seed germination method is widely used to assess the impact of individual environmental factors (e.g., low or high temperatures, salinity, moisture deficiency, ionizing radiation, heavy metals, nanoparticles, or magnetic fields) or their combined effects by means of biometric parameters (e.g., seed germination energy, seed vigor, seedling survival, and root and shoot lengths) at early stages of plant development [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]. In several studies, the roll culture method has been applied [19,20,25,27] or Petri dishes have been used [18,[21][22][23]28]. In these cases, experiments are conducted in distilled water, aqueous solutions, soil extracts, and suspensions with the adverse factors.…”

“…Petri dishes create stable microclimatic conditions for germination, and evaporation of the working solution is minimized due to the cover. Other researchers employ vessels with soil mixtures [21,30]. An advantage of this seed germination method has been established in a study on root growth and development during evaluation of the quality of soil contaminated with heavy metals [31] as compared to soil extracts.…”