Salicylic acid: To assuage salinity stress at the early seedling stage of rice

Abstract

Being sessile, plants rely on internal modulation of growth and development to cope up with the changing environmental condition. Among the endogenous regulators, salicylic acid has a major role in restoration of plant growth and providing tolerance towards diverse environmental stresses including salinity stress. Seven genotypes FL 478, ADT 45, ADT 46, ADT 50, CR 1009, KKL(R)1, IW Ponni ) were selected  and treated with 100 ppm SA and sown under saline condition(150 mM NaCl). In this experiment the growth parameters like root length, shoot length, root to shoot ratio and biochemical parameters like total chlorophyll and carotenoids were estimated. When rice seeds treated with 100 ppm of SA, the inhibitory effect of salinity stress on growth parameters were alleviated and significant increase in root to shoot ratio were noticed, which is a very important physiological trait for abiotic stress tolerance. Moreover, there is an increase in both chlorophyll and carotenoid content in seedling stage. This shows that, the increased growth parameters might have attributed to the increase in photosynthetic pigments by exogenous application of salicylic acid under salinity stress in rice.