Abatement the effect of water scarcity on pepper seedlings by sees priming with hydrogen peroxide

WOS:000629180500082 Among the abiotic stress factors, drought is one of the most critical stressors which could be in coaction with plant diseases and other stressors. Mitigating the impact of drought on plants will assist in managing the control of plant diseases with an indirect approach. Seed priming is recently one of the preferred techniques to combat with biotic and abiotic stress factors. This study is aimed at assessing the effects of seed priming with H2O2 on pepper seedlings for decreasing effect of water stress under controlled conditions. Pre-sowing seed treatment was performed as four different applications including three concentrations of hydrogen peroxide (at 1%, 2% and 3%) and sterile, distilled water. The seeds were, afterwards, sown in pots that had three types of irrigation regimes (100%, 50%, and 25% of field capacity) applied following the initial life water of sown seeds. Besides, the effects of treatments on seed germination potentials were simply determined through blotting paper test. Seed priming with hydrogen peroxide at %1 was the most effective concentration for plants watered at 100% of field capacity (FC) in terms of all physiological parameters taken in the study. The seed treatment promoted the growth of pepper plants nicely at full FC by enabling it to obtain the maximum plant length (11.00 cm), root length (11.08 cm), fresh plant weight (9.45 g) and number of leaves (10.33). Besides, 1% H2O2 was followed with 2% concentration for promoting the plants with good performance under the water deficit at 50 and 25% of FC. However, the study revealed that seed pretreatment with H2O2 at 3% had a negative effect on the growth of pepper plants. The germination percentage of the treated seeds were 76.67, 65.83, 40.00, and 30.83, treated with sterile distilled water, 1%, 2%, and 3% concentrations of hydrogen peroxide, respectively. The results concluded that seed priming with lower concentration (1%) hydrogen peroxide might be used to improve growth for pepper plants under water deficit conditions.