Abstract:
Soil salinity is becoming a serious abiotic factor which limits the productivity of many crops worldwide.
Seedling tolerance to salinity is critical for growth and development of rice. Therefore? it is essential to
enhance the salinity tolerance by genetic improvements and agronomic methods. Seed priming is
considered an easy, low cost, low risk and effective technique which enhances plant tolerance to the
stressful environments. Therefore, a pot experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of different
osmopriming treatments on salinity tolerance of rice seedlings. Rice variety At 362 was used for the
experiment. Coconut water and fermented rice water was used as organic osmoprime solutions, whiles
Ascorbic acid, KC1, KNO3, ZnS04 and CaC2 1 and 2 % solutions were used as inorganic osmoprime
solutions. Water was used as the control. Two salinity levels ie. 50 and 100mM NaCl were also used.
Completely Randomized Design (CRD) was used as experiment design with three replicates. Two weeks
after salinity induction seedling height, root volume and shoot dry weight were recorded. Most of the
organic and inorganic osmoprime agents increased measured variables compare to the seedlings
produced from hydro primed seeds. Out of them 2% CaC2 showed greatest performances under stress
conditions Therefore seed osmopriming may enable establishment of more salinity tolerant rice seedlings;
however seedling survival and yield performances under field level should be investigated.
