Electrical Conductivity Test for Measurement of White Clover Seeds Vigor

Lucian A Dos Santos,Letícia R De Medeiros,Priscila M Marchi,Francisco A Villela,João R Pimentel,Ivan R Carvalho,Andréa B N Martins,Carolina C Pinto,Vinícius J Szareski,Géri E Meneghello,Nairiane Dos S Bilhalva,Tiago Pedo,Cristian Troyjack,Lilian V M De Tunes,Tiago Z Aumonde,Jainara F Netto

doi:10.5539/jas.v11n12p40

Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate the physiological performance of white clover seed lots of different tegument colours, besides to analyses the electrical conductivity test methodology with different seeds number, water volume and soaking periods. The experiment was developed at the Seed Didactic Laboratory in the Agronomy College &ldquo;Eliseu Maciel&rdquo; at the Federal University of Pelotas, in Pelotas-RS, Brazil. White clover seeds were manually separate, composing four lots of different coloured seeds: yellow, orange, brown and mixed. White clover seeds of yellow colour tend to present greater physiological potential through its germination and vigour. The electrical conductivity test was not efficient on identifying different vigour levels in white clover seed lots.

Highlights

IntroductionThe white clover (Trifolium repens L.), belonging to Fabaceae family, is a winter perennial forage legume of great importance for animals diet, due to its significant improvement on the pasture nutritional quality (Olivo et al, 2012)
The white clover (Trifolium repens L.), belonging to Fabaceae family, is a winter perennial forage legume of great importance for animals diet, due to its significant improvement on the pasture nutritional quality (Olivo et al, 2012). This species has uneven flowering, resulting in plants with tegument of seeds ranging from yellow to brown-red colour, because of the different ripening stages of seeds at harvest (Costa et al, 2014)
Photoassimilates from mother plant stop been sent to seeds; and the longer the time that seeds remain in field, will be more exposed to environment adversities, risking physiological quality losses (Szareski et al, 2017; Troyjack et al, 2018; Zanatta et al, 2018)

Summary

Introduction

The white clover (Trifolium repens L.), belonging to Fabaceae family, is a winter perennial forage legume of great importance for animals diet, due to its significant improvement on the pasture nutritional quality (Olivo et al, 2012) This species has uneven flowering, resulting in plants with tegument of seeds ranging from yellow to brown-red colour, because of the different ripening stages of seeds at harvest (Costa et al, 2014). It is worth to mention that white clover seeds have different tegument colours, due to its genetic makeup and seeds age, in way that along the seeds lot ageing, the yellow colored seeds proportion reduces and the amount of brown colored seeds increases (West & Harris, 1963) In this way, seeds harvested just after achieve the physiological maturity present greater vigour, and high vigorous seeds origin better growing plants, with higher yield, compared to plants originated from low vigour seeds (Batista et al, 2015; Monteiro et al, 2016; Abati et al, 2017; Szareski et al, 2018). Laboratory testspresent ideal conditions (Delazeri et al, 2016; Rigo et al, 2018), differently from what occurs on the field when seeds are planted, where conditions may be adverse, revealing inferior germination rates (Grzybowski et al, 2015; Gehlling et al, 2018)

Objectives

Methods

Results