Anand Sonkar¹, Shalini Kaushik Love^1,, Romila Rawat Bisht¹, Sharda Mahilkar Sonkar², Saumya Agrawal¹, Gunjan Verma¹, Rishu Raj¹, Gaurav Bansal¹, Nitasha ¹

Salt tolerance in plants with respect to their environmental conditions has become a concerning issue nowadays as the soil of various parts of agricultural land has been degraded due to various ecological factors and human activities. Salinity can affect soil heath, decrease plant growth and reduce crop productivity. Cicer arietinum L. (Chickpea) being one of the most abundantly consumed foods by humans and as well as animals. The present research work aims to study the effect of salt stress and if the salt stress can be ameliorated by Gibberellic Acid (GA₃) in chickpea. The effect has been studied on seed germination of two different varieties of Cicer arietinum L. (RVG 202 and GNG 2144). The experiment was done by using a Completely Randomized Block Design with three replicates of each variety at different concentrations of salt and hormone. Different concentrations of NaCl used were 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100 mM, and the different GA₃ concentrations used were 0, 50 and 100 ppm by pre-treatment. GA₃ treated seeds were sown in different saline conditions in cocopeat under natural climatic conditions. and the plant seedlings were analyzed after 20 days of sowing the seeds The application of GA₃ was found to play a great role in seed germination under saline conditions. Maximum seed germination was observed in the GNG 2144 variety (more than 96%) at two different concentrations of GA₃ and the minimum seed germination was found at the highest given salt concentration in both varieties. The present study suggests that GA₃ application has potential to improve the seed germination in chickpea grown under salt stress.

Cicer arietinum, Gibberellic acid, salt tolerance, seed germination, seed priming