Micro-nutrient Seed Priming: A Pragmatic Approach Towards Abiotic Stress Management

Abstract

Global population is increasing presently at a rate of 1.08% per year and that represents about an increase in 82 million people yearly. Over two centuries sevenfold increment in global population has magnified human’s influence towards natural environment and disturbed its stability. Likewise, different abiotic and biotic stresses and climate change phenomenon are also responsible for catastrophic losses of the food value and productivity in agriculturally important crops. Moreover, stresses or adverse conditions lower the quality of food by curtailing the essential nutrient content in food grains. Among these essential nutrients, micro-nutrients hold the most important position for the optimum metabolic and cellular functions of living organisms. Living organism suffers from many kinds of disease/adverse conditions due to the absence of these micro-nutrients. Therefore, the optimum allocation of nutrition to plant is an important factor for improving the yield and quality food production. To diminish these losses in crops, many techniques were developed by the agriculturist, which helped in the increase in quality and production under the various adverse situations. Among them, seed priming is one of the cheap, reliable and cost-effective technique to ameliorate the effects of diverse stresses and improve food quality and production in important agriculture crops. Considering these facts, this chapter depicts the role of different micro-nutrients in plant system and responses of the plant under different adverse climatic situations. Furthermore, it will also illustrate the management of these adverse climatic conditions through the micro-nutrient seed priming (MNSP).