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Physiological potential of piquin pepper seeds in response to pregermination treatments

ABSTRACT Wild piquin pepper fruits are consumed and traded because of their flavor, nutritional and pharmaceutical properties. The heterogeneous germination of its seeds has caused pregermination treatments to be unstandardized. Because of that, our goal was to evaluate pregermination treatments of piquin pepper seeds from a wild plant from the municipality of Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico, consisting of immersion for different periods (2, 24, 48 h) in solutions with variable concentrations of the growth regulators naphthalene acetic acid (NAA; 0.1, 1.0, 2.5 mM), salicylic acid (SA; 1.0, 5.0, 10 mM), gibberellic acid (GA3, 1.0, 5.0, 10 mM), indole-3-butyric acid (IBA; 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 mM), the commercial product Biozyme (Bioz) containing minerals and growth regulators (Bioz; 0.5, 1, 2%), and sulfuric acid (H2SO4; 2, 5, 10%) in a completely randomized design, using distilled water as the control. For each treatment, we measured the imbibition ratio, germination percentage, time to obtain 50% germination (T50), and coefficient of variation of germination time (CVt). Our results showed that the imbibition was similar in the control and the treatments, but it differed between treatments. The highest imbibition recorded in 48 h was 87%. The highest germination percentage (79.2%) was achieved with 2 h immersion in 2% Bioz, followed by 1 mM NAA (62%) and 5 mM SA (56%). T50 and CVt were 10-26 d and 0-39%, respectively. According to our results, we concluded that the pregermination treatments we assayed improved the physiological potential for the germination of piquin pepper seeds.