Seed Quality of Two Sunflower Cultivar by Seed Priming Effect with Seaweed Extract

Abstract

Abstract An experiment was conducted at the Seed Technology Laboratory of the Field Crops Department in the College of Agriculture Engineering Science at the University of Baghdad. The goal was to investigate how treating two different sunflower varieties with seaweed extract would affect the viability and vigor of their seeds. The experiment was designed using CRD distributed factorial experiments over four trials and included two factors. The first factor consisted of seed priming treatments with five different concentrations of seaweed extract (ranging from 1 to 5 gm l-1) and a comparison treatment with only distilled water. The second factor involved testing two cultivars of sunflower (Ishaqi-1 and Ishaqi-2). The results showed that the Ishaqi-2 cultivar outperformed the Ishaqi-1 cultivar in all aspects studied. The highest mean values were observed for traits such as germination rate in the first and second intestines, radicle and plumule length, germination strength, seedling dry weight, and the percentage of normal seedlings in the aging test (63.82%, 94.21%, 4.430 cm, 8.411 cm, 1214.3, 0.4465 gm and 46.70%, respectively). The findings displayed a striking impact of the varying amounts of seaweed extract, with the highest concentration of 4 gm l-1 exhibiting superiority in multiple aspects, such as the germination rate in both initial and subsequent counts, as well as the length of the first root and shoot, overall seedling strength, and dry weight (66.19%, 97.25%, 5.339 cm, 9.194 cm, 1413.5, and 0.4778 gm, respectively). The interaction between the two factors explored in the study displayed varying results in numerous traits, but the most prominent was the stimulation of seeds of the Ishaqi cultivar with the concentration of 2 gm l-1 of seaweed extract.