Studies on Seed Germination in Capsicum Seeds (Solan Bharpur) under Abiotic Stress

Abstract

Plants often experience abiotic stress like salinity, drought, high or low temperature, flooding, metal toxicity, ozone, UV-radiations, herbicides, etc., which pose serious threat to the crop production. Germination studies showed that heavy metal exposure caused a decrease in seed germination and at higher doses the seeds failed to germinate. This was confirmed by root length and shoot length. Ascorbic acid content was found to be decreased in all the treatment groups. However the phenol content was found to be decreased significantly with increasing concentrations of metals. There was considerable increase in phenolic content in water logging conditions. Metal treatment also led to an increase in catalase activity, thus showing that abiotic stress induced oxidative stress in the plants and antioxidants tend to neutralize this stress.