Population growth, food shortages, climate change and water scarcity are some of the frightening challenges being confronted in today's world. Water deficit or drought stress has been considered a severe limitation for the productivity of rice, a widely popular nutritive cereal crop and the staple food of a large portion of the population. A key stage in crop growth is seed emergence, which is mostly constrained by abiotic elements such as high temperatures, soil crusting and low water potential, which are responsible for poor stand establishment. Seed priming is a pre-sowing treatment of seeds that primes them to a physiological state that allows them to emerge more proficiently. The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential of leaf extracts from local and exotic moringa landraces as seed priming agents in rice cultivated under water deficit (75% field capacity) and control conditions (100% field capacity). Rice seeds were placed in an aerated solution of moringa leaf extract (MLE) at 3% from three obtained landraces (Faisalabad, Multan and an exotic landrace of India). The results obtained from the experimentation show that the water deficit regime adversely affected the studied indicators including emergence and growth attributes as well as physiological parameters. Among the priming agents, MLE from the Faisalabad landrace significantly improved the speed and spread of emergence of rice seedlings (time to start emergence at 23%, emergence index at 75%, mean emergence time at 3.58% and final emergence percentage at 46%). All the priming agents enhanced the growth, photosynthetic pigments, gas exchange parameters and antioxidant activities, particularly under the water deficit regime, but the maximum improvement was recorded by the MLE from the Faisalabad landrace. Therefore, the MLE of the Faisalabad landrace can be productively used to boost the seedling establishment and growth of rice grown under normal and water deficit conditions.

Department of Agricultural Engineering Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology Rahim Yar Khan 64000 Pakistan

Department of Agrochemistry Soil Science Microbiology and Plant Nutrition Faculty of AgriSciences Mendel University in Brno Zemědělská 1 613 00 Brno Czech Republic

Department of Agronomy PMA Shah Arid Agriculture University Rawalpindi 46000 Pakistan

Department of Botany and Microbiology College of Science King Saud University P O Box 2455 Riyadh 11451 Saudi Arabia

Department of Botany University of Agriculture Faisalabad 38040 Pakistan

Department of Soil and Environmental Science Ghazi University Dera Ghazi Khan 32200 Pakistan

National Agricultural Research Centre Islamabad 45500 Pakistan

Pedologiejh spol s r o Podstránská 692 71 627 00 Brno Czech Republic

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Impact of varying levels of soil salinity on emergence, growth and biochemical attributes of four Moringa oleifera landraces