Abstract

To study the effects of seed priming on agronomic traits of maize under different salt concentration a factorial experiment based on completely randomized design with 3 replications was employed. The experiment was carried out in Valiasr University of Rafsanjan, Iran in 2009. Salinity treatments were 0, 4, 8 and 12 dSm^-1 and priming treatments were 0.0, 0.5 and 1.0 M NaCl. Shoot dry weight (SDW), shoot length (SL), leaves number (LN), leaf area (LA), chlorophyll (Chl) and ion leakage (IL) were measured. Effects of salinity and seed priming on shoot dry weight, shoot length, leaves number, leaf area, chlorophyll and ion leakage were significant (P < 0.01). Increasing salinity up to 12 dS.m^-1 negatively influenced all traits except ion leakage and the amount of reduction for the mentioned traits were 75.67, 52.25, 25, 69.97 and 21.17%, respectively, compared to the control. In the case of ion leakage, it was 3.03 times of control. Seed priming compensated the negative effects of salinity on the traits and all of them positively responded to seed priming. Based on these results seed priming with NaCl may be considered as a reliable procedure to increase the maize salinity tolerance. 

Key words: Salinity, priming, physiological traits, corn.