Abstract:

Since corn is sensitive to salt and saline irrigation water, soil salinity poses a serious threat to corn production. Therefore, it is important to know in advance the response of the cultivated corn varieties to salt stress in order not to lose too much in production. In this study, it was aimed to determine the response to salt (NaCl) stress of thirteen commercial silage maize hybrid varieties commonly used by farmers in Türkiye. For this purpose, seed germination and early seedling growth were tested by exposing the plants to different salt stress levels (0, 40, 80 and 120 mM) for 14 days. Three basic groups (Biomass, Seedling Growth Vigor and Seed Germination) were established by factor analysis (FA) for the nine parameters -seed germination percentage (sgp), mean germination time (mgt), shoot lenght (sl), root lenght (rl), fresh weight (fw), dry weight(dw), dry matter (dm), plant water content (pwc), vigor index (vi)- tested for seed germination and seedling growth. As a result of the two-way analysis of variance with heterogeneous variance on standardized factor scores; it was determined that 'Dekalb-7211' hybrid cultivar showed the best performance and "Dekalb-7240" hybrid cultivar showed the worst performance in different salt stress levels tested in terms of three main groups formed. The results of this research will contribute to the determination of stress-tolerant varieties, which is one of the important and first steps of maize breeding.

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