Effect of Electric Shock Application and Hydropriming on Increasing Wheat Water Productivity under Different Salinity Levels

Although evidence points to increased salinity and depletion of water and soil resources, increasing demand for food due to rapid population growth and a lack of good quality water resources has made use of inappropriate water quality inevitable. Salinity affects the germination and seedling growth of plants through the toxicity of the elements, disruption of the absorption of the elements and the reduction of water potential. The establishment and germination stages are the most sensitive stages of plant growth to salinity and there are several methods to reduce the negative effects of soil and water salinity and increase the uniformity of emergence and ultimately yield of plants. Application of electric shock and hydropriming, respectively, are new and practical methods to increase salinity. Although there is little scientific information on the effects of electric shock on seed germination, seed priming is one of the most commonly used methods to reduce the negative effects of salinity. These methods induce initial resistance to salt stress. For this purpose, an experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of priming and electric shocks on germination and some of the initial vegetative traits of wheat.

The experiment was carried out in a factorial experiment with three replications in two separate experiments in the year of 2017 at the research site of Medicinal plants of Faculty of Agriculture, Torbat-e-Heydarieh University. Factors consisted of seed primers in two levels (non-primer and primer with distilled water for 48 hours), electric shock at two levels (non-shock and electric shock with a voltage of 20 kW) and salinity with sodium chloride at three levels (zero, 200 and 400 mM), which was carried out in two separate experiments in germination in Petri dish and in field conditions.

The results of analysis of variance showed that the effect of seed primer, induction of electric shock and salinity and their interaction at 1% level in all studied traits had a significant effect. The results of simple effects of three independent factors showed that the primitives of the seeds before cultivation increased all studied germination traits (other than germination speed). Field results indicated that traits were affected by different treatments of primer, shock and salinity. Seeds and application of electric shock caused a significant increase in the number of spikes per square meter, number of seeds per spike, 1000 seed weight, chlorophyll A, plant height, grain yield and biological yield, as well as harvest index of wheat. Increasing levels of salinity significantly reduced the traits it was mentioned. The decrease in traits was higher due to increased salinity levels in non-primer-non-shock conditions compared to primer-induced shock conditions.

The application of electric shock and hydropriming can significantly increase the seed germination and primary growth of wheat and so increase the competition power with weeds. In addition in farm conditions, electric shock and seed priming enhanced yield and its components , especially in salinity stress conditions.