Impact of silver nanochitosan in protecting wheat seeds from fungal infection and increasing growth parameters

Wheat is regarded as the prime source of dietary carbohydrate, protein in the majority of countries all over the world. Wheat growth, productivity and seed quality has been extensively hampered by the aggression of seed-borne pathogens during post-harvest storage. The present work focus on the efficacy of chitosan-based Ag²⁺ nanoparticles (Ag-CNPs) for the management of seed borne pathogens of wheat and their subsequent effects on growth, yield, and quality of harvested seeds. For this, healthy seeds of wheat were nanoprimed with Ag-CNPs and further inoculated with A. flavus so as to induce pathogenic stress. These seeds were sown in pots in a completely randomized block design and plants were raised from both nanoprimed and inoculated seeds, while plants were also raised from non-nanoprimed primed and uninoculated that served as control. Nanoprimed and pathogen inoculated seeds effectively increased vegetative growth such as (132.31 %), fresh weight (1.63-fold), dry weight (1.67-fold), and panicle length (137.03 %). and amplified the number of grains per spike, harvest index, ten kernel weight, and yield/plant, despite of pathogenic interference. Concomitantly, Ag-CNPs nano-priming enhances the harvested seed quality raised from pathogen inoculated seeds plants. The integrated density of the bands obtained in SDS-PAGE of variedly primed seeds revealed that Ag-CNP priming improved wheat's total protein profiling with a denser band intensity. The antioxidant enzymatic activity of CAT, POD, SOD, and NOX was traced maximum in Ag-CNPs primed seeds by 13.52, 7.90, 26.6 and 16.08 units, respectively. Thus, it can be concluded that nano priming with Ag-CNPs mitigated the wheat seeds from pathogenic stress and efficiently increased yield parameters and quality of harvested seeds.