Abstract
Plant-derived smoke has been known to play an important role in distribution and growth of vegetation. Using a proficiently designed furnace, we extracted smoke from the leaves of four plant viz. Helianthus annuus,Aloe vera,Ginkgo biloba, and Cymbopogon jwarancusa. Smoke dilutions obtained from these plants were obtained in different concentrations to identify potential lettuce growth promoting smoke solution. Results revealed that smoke obtained from G. biloba significantly enhanced the lettuce seed germination. This solution was then partitioned into ethyl acetate, dichloromethane, n-hexane, chloroform and ether fractions. Ethyl acetate fraction was found to be potent to enhance seed germination. This fraction was subjected to column chromatography and spectroscopic techniques to obtain compound 1. This compound was identified as hydroquinone using 1D and 2D NMR techniques. At low concentrations (5, 10, and 20 ppm), compound 1 enhanced the lettuce seed germination; however, higher concentrations inhibited its growth as compared to control.
Highlights
Natural fire to vegetation has been identified to enhance seed germination in soil (Light et al, 2004)
All smoke solutions derived from these four plants along with respective dilutions (1:50, 1:100, and 1:500) were tested on lettuce seed germination and growth
Hydroquinone with concentration of 0.1 mM resulted in inhibiting the growth of leafy spurge
Summary
Natural fire to vegetation has been identified to enhance seed germination in soil (Light et al, 2004). Plant-derived smoke has been shown to promote seed germination of about 1,200 phylogenetically diverse plant species (Dixon et al, 2009). The first report about role of plant-extracted smoke in the induction of seed germination was published in 1990 (De Lange and Boucher, 1990). Beside germination enhancement of soil seed bank, smoke increases the seedling vigor even in species where it does not induce seed germination (Brown and van Staden, 1997; Sparg et al, 2005; Stevens et al, 2007; Kamran et al, 2013). The difficulty in isolating the active compounds from plant-derived smoke is due to the presence of
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