Assessing Influence of Ozone in Tomato Seed Dormancy Alleviation

N. Sudhakar, D. Nagendra-Prasad, N. Mohan, Bradford Hill, M. Gunasekaran, K. Murugesan

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DOI: 10.4236/ajps.2011.23051                

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 5^th 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.

Keywords

Abscissic Acid, Germination, Ozone, Tomato Seed

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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