Abstract
Population growth, food shortages, climate change and water scarcity are some of the frightening challenges being confronted in today’s world. Water deficit or drought stress has been considered a severe limitation for the productivity of rice, a widely popular nutritive cereal crop and the staple food of a large portion of the population. A key stage in crop growth is seed emergence, which is mostly constrained by abiotic elements such as high temperatures, soil crusting and low water potential, which are responsible for poor stand establishment. Seed priming is a pre-sowing treatment of seeds that primes them to a physiological state that allows them to emerge more proficiently. The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential of leaf extracts from local and exotic moringa landraces as seed priming agents in rice cultivated under water deficit (75% field capacity) and control conditions (100% field capacity). Rice seeds were placed in an aerated solution of moringa leaf extract (MLE) at 3% from three obtained landraces (Faisalabad, Multan and an exotic landrace of India). The results obtained from the experimentation show that the water deficit regime adversely affected the studied indicators including emergence and growth attributes as well as physiological parameters. Among the priming agents, MLE from the Faisalabad landrace significantly improved the speed and spread of emergence of rice seedlings (time to start emergence at 23%, emergence index at 75%, mean emergence time at 3.58% and final emergence percentage at 46%). All the priming agents enhanced the growth, photosynthetic pigments, gas exchange parameters and antioxidant activities, particularly under the water deficit regime, but the maximum improvement was recorded by the MLE from the Faisalabad landrace. Therefore, the MLE of the Faisalabad landrace can be productively used to boost the seedling establishment and growth of rice grown under normal and water deficit conditions.
Highlights
The human population is rapidly increasing, and food production is augmenting.There is massive pressure on all the available natural resources to feed the 9.7 billion people on earth by 2050
The effect of the moringa leaf extracts as a priming agent as well as the water regimes on rice seedlings was studied through various indicators such as emergence and growth attributes, photosynthetic pigments, gas exchange parameters and antioxidant activities
It was observed that water regimes and priming agents significantly influenced the emergence and growth attributes, photosynthetic pigments, gas exchange parameters and antioxidant activities
Summary
The human population is rapidly increasing, and food production is augmenting.There is massive pressure on all the available natural resources to feed the 9.7 billion people on earth by 2050. Three billion people consume rice as a staple food because it provides 20% of energy in the diet, whereas 19% and 5% energy supplies are from wheat and maize, respectively [3,4]. Field crop species are frequently exposed to disparaging environmental circumstances, especially abiotic stresses, which limit the yield and productivity of field crops [5]. Among these stresses, drought or water deficit is a major stress responsible for the low productivity of rice crops worldwide [6,7]. Plants are exposed to drought conditions when the loss of water through transpiration is higher than the supply of water to the root zone [9]. The level of mutilation produced by drought is normally capricious because it is influenced by a number of elements, evapotranspiration, rainfall patterns and the water holding capacity of the soil
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