RAKRITI DHAKA*, SRIDEVI TALLAPRAGADA, SARITA DEVI, SATPAL, PANKAJ AND B. K. DHAKA
Department of Botany & Plant Physiology
Forage Section, Department of Genetics & Plant Breeding
CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar-125 004 (Haryana), India
*(e-mail : dhaka1109prakriti@gmail.com)
(Received : 15 December 2022; Accepted : 30 December 2022)
SUMMARY
In contemporary era, salinization of soil is one of the challenging environmental concerns all over the world. Excessive salt adversely affects the productivity of agricultural crops in terms of quality and quantity of produce. Sorghum also known as jowar, is the fifth key crop among cereals, have a number of medicinal properties for human beings. Sorghum being comparatively tolerant to salinity; however its growth is also negatively affected by salinity by altering physiological and biochemical processes and elevating ROS-caused oxidative stress. Understanding responses of sorghum against salinity would be therefore helpful in adopting appropriate procedure to increase its productivity in stressed conditions. Salinity adversely affects all the growth-related traits like plant weight, fodder yield etc. Enormous strategies can be taken into account to alleviate salt stress in sorghum crop and one of these methods is the application of plant stress hormones like ABA, Brassinosteroids, Jasmonates etc. In response to various abiotic and biotic stresses jasmonic acid accumulates rapidly and transiently. Foliar application of jasmonic acid improve plant morphological characters, enhances vegetative growth by increasing fresh and dry weight under salt stress. The objective of the present study was to assess the effects of exogenous application of 4.5, 6.5 and 8.5 mM Jasmonic acid (JA), an endogenous plant growth regulator, on mitigation of oxidative and osmotic stresses caused by various levels of NaCl (control, 4, 6 and 8 dS m-1) in sorghum genotypes (HJ 541 and CSV 21F). Salt stress negatively affected sorghum growth from the aspect of fresh weight of different plant parts and plant biomass. While, jasmonic acid helped sorghum to overcome the negative influence of salt stress to some extent, application of 8.5 mM of jasmonic acid proved most efficient at all levels of salinity in both the genotypes. CSV 21F performed better as compare to HJ 541 at all levels of salt stress under the influence of different spray of jasmonic acid.
Key words: Salinity stress, jasmonic acid, sorghum, fresh weight, dry weight