The Effect of Ethyl Methylsulfonate on Germination and Morphological Traits of Camelina as a Medicinal Plant

Camelina sativa (L.) Crantz is an annual flowering plant that belongs to the Brassicaceae family. C. sativa as a dicotyledonous plant, one of its characteristics is morphological formability to respond to large environmental changes. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of ethyl methylsulfonate on germination and morphological traits of C. saiva. Ethyl methanesulfonate (EMS) is one of the most potent mutagenic and carcinogenic compounds that cause point-substitution-mutation in the genome. To induce mutations in this experiment, ethyl methanesulfonate with concentrations of 0.1% and 0.5% was used in two periods of 8 and 16 hours on 200 seeds of Camelina. The results of variance analysis for plant heights, number of leaves per sub-branch, number of seeds per pod, number of main branch leaves, stem diameter, and pod length did not show the significant difference, but the only significant difference was for the trait of pod width. Also, results showed that there was a significant difference between the tested treatments in terms of germination percentage, longest root length, mean root length, mean shoot length, seedling fresh weight, and seedling dry weight. According to the results of germination experiments, EMS treatment widely affected all six studied traits, therefore,  the amounts of the largest root length and shoot length decreased with increasing EMS concentration, but this relationship was not observed in other traits. Although EMS is classified as toxic, for germination percentage, it was observed that with increasing concentration and time of EMS treatment, germination percentage also increased. According to the correlation results, all traits had a positive and significant relationship with each other, which is probably due to the nature of the traits and their additive effect.