X-radiation of Lotus corniculatus L. seeds improves germination and initial seedling growth

Abstract

Purpose

Lotus corniculatus L. (bird’s foot trefoil, BFT) is a valuable perennial legume forage species due to its high nutritive value, persistence under grazing, and condensed tannin content that improves ruminant production and prevents bloating. However, it is less preferred by farmers compared with other perennial forage legumes such as alfalfa because of slow germination, slow establishment and low seedling vigor. This study was conducted to determine whether X-ray seed priming could improve these deficiencies.

Materials and methods

Seeds of L. corniculatus cv. ‘AC Langille’ were irradiated at 0, 100, and 300 Gy. Non-irradiated and irradiated seeds were sown on Murashige and Skoog/Gamborg medium under in vitro conditions and cultured for 21 days. Germination percentage, mean germination time (MGT), germination rate index, length of shoot and root, fresh and dry weight of shoot and root, dry matter ratios of shoot and root, water content of shoot and root, and seedling vigor index were measured.

Results

The results of this study demonstrated that X-ray seed priming significantly increased the germination percentage of L. corniculatus, increased the germination rate and thereby shortened the MGT, and improved seedling growth. However, X-ray pretreatment also decreased seedling shoot and root biomass.

Conclusions

In this study, it is reported for the first time that X-ray seed pretreatment has the potential to address important seedling establishment issues in L. corniculatus.

Keywords:

• Lotus corniculatus L.
• X-rays
• germination
• seedling growth

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Prof. Dr. Jennifer W. MacAdam, Utah State University (Utah-Logan-USA), for generously using her laboratory in the conduct of the research.

Author contributions

RB and JWM: conceived the research plans and designed the experiments; RB: performed the experiments; RB and JWM: wrote the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Ramazan Beyaz

Ramazan Beyaz is currently working at Kırşehir Ahi Evran University, Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition in Türkiye as an Assoc. Prof. Dr. He received his MSc (2010) and Ph.D. (2014) degree from Biotechnology Institute of Ankara University, Türkiye. Dr. Beyaz’s scientific interests are in plant biotechnology, plant mutation breeding and plant stress physiology. Currently, he is working on projects that improve new salt and drought-tolerant crop plant varieties by using ionizing radiation, plant biotechnology techniques and CRISPR-Cas9 systems. Dr. Beyaz published several peer-reviewed articles, three chapters in the book Plant Engineering, Water Stress in Plants, and Seed Dormancy.

Jennifer W. MacAdam

Jennifer W. MacAdam’s graduate training was at the University of Missouri-Columbia (UM-C) in agronomy with an emphasis on the physiology of forage plants; her graduate research focused on the anatomy and physiology of grass leaf development. Following her PhD in 1988, she taught the Crop Physiology course at UM-C for one semester and gained postdoctoral experience in animal science and basic plant biochemistry and physiology. In 1991, she accepted a Forage research and teaching position at Utah State University. She has taught the foraging class at Utah State University and developed an undergraduate course, The Structure and Function of Plants, for which she also published a text. She has served as the chair of the Forage and Grazinglands Division of the Crop Science Society of America, as a technical editor of the Forage and Grazinglands journal, and as an associate editor for both the Crop Science and Agronomy Journal. She is currently an editor of the Journal of Agricultural Science, Cambridge, and is on the editorial boards of the MDPI journals Agronomy and Grasses, as well as the Wiley journal Grassland Research. She is a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy and the Crop Science Society of America.