T. Sanaullah
2016
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0
Influential Citations
4
Citations
Journal
Applied Ecology and Environmental Research
Abstract
Thiourea is a potential plant growth regulator that improves stress tolerance potential in a variety of plants. Exogenous application of thiourea enhanced the growth and yield of plants, but different concentrations are required by different crops therefore optimization of thiourea is needed for each crop plant. These experiments were arranged to screen out optimum level of thiourea for maize hybrids at both whole plant and cellular levels. Two experiments were done, first at whole plant level; two hybrids DK6789 and 33M15 were used. Thirteen levels of thiourea (0, 200, and 400, to 2400 μM) were applied through sand application to plants after 15 days of germination, and in second experiment same hybrids were used to investigate optimum level of thiourea for callusing attributes. Immature embryo were cultured on N6 (Chu et al) medium supplemented with 3.99g/L salt, 3% sucrose, 2.5 g/L proline, 0.2g/L casein hydrolysate, 2,4-D 2g/L, AgNO3 0.015 g/L, and agar 8g/L. Above applied levels of thiourea were supplemented to callus induction medium. Among all applied thiourea levels, 400 μM thiourea level was found to be most effective. Thiourea significantly improved in vivo attributes like shoot and root length, fresh and dry weights of shoot and root, leaf area and shoot/root mass ratio. Thiourea was also found very effective in improving in vitro attributes especially improved callus quantity and quality. This could be a great achievement towards better maize genetic transformations for development of resistant crops.