Accelerated Germination by Osmotic Seed Treatment

Abstract

CROP seeds sown in cold soil are notoriously slow to emerge and it would obviously be desirable to shorten the time from sowing to seedling emergence and the time between the emergence of the first and the last seedling. This has occasionally been achieved by the pre-sowing seed treatment sometimes referred to as ‘hardening’^1–3 or ‘advancing’⁴ involving repeated cycles of imbibition of a carefully controlled quantity of water, followed by drying back the seeds before the radicles emerge but results have not been consistent. There have been some successful attempts to replace this method by imbibition of seeds in salt solutions^5–7; tomato seeds thus treated for 6 d exhibit a much higher level of RNA production during germination than untreated seeds⁸.