A rapid and effective method for dormancy breakage and germination of King of Bitters (Andrographis paniculata Nees.) seeds

Authors

  • Daryush Talei Medicinal Plant Research Center, Shahed University, Tehran
  • Alireza Valdiani Department of Biochemistry, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor
  • Mohd Puad Abdullah Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor DE
  • Siti Aishah Hassan Department of Crop Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor

Keywords:

Andrographis paniculata, dormancy breakge, sandpaper scarification, seed germination

Abstract

Andrographis paniculata is a medicinal plant of the Acanthaceae family. The plant is important for its diterpenoids obtained from the mature plants grown normally through the seeds. However, the seed germination is slow and not efficient. Here, we report an effective method for breaking the seed dormancy to improve the germination per¬centage. Among the different physical and chemical scarification methods the fastest and the highest germination percentage were obtained from the seeds scarified with sandpaper. After three days of the scarification, 72.7% of the seeds germinated and this percentage was further increased to 90.4% after 15 days with a mean germina¬tion time (MGTa15) of 4 days. Although, the other physical and chemical treatments showed moderate effects on germination (GPa15 ranged from 7% to 64%), but they failed to reduce the MGTa15. Treating the sandpaper-scarified seeds with the seeds and the seeds coat protein extracts delayed the germination but did not affect the overall germination percentage, indicating the presence of unknown germinating factor(s) which may contribute to the dormancy of the seed. Together, the germination factor(s) and the hard seed coat caused the seed dormancy of A. paniculata which could be overcome by sandpaper scarification.

Downloads

Published

2012-11-29

Issue

Vol. 57 No. 2 (2012)

Section

Articles

License

Copyright The corresponding author represents all the manuscript’s authors. Upon manuscript acceptance, copyright becomes held by Maydica, which adopts an open access publishing policy. Published articles can be retrieved from the Maydica web site free of charge for personal use, deposition into any departmental or institutional repository, or distribution for any commercial or non-commercial endeavor. Articles obtained from the web site may not be altered in any way without the permission of the Maydica editors. The corresponding author must obtain permission to reproduce figures, tables, or text from other copyrighted material.