effects of seed priming by biofertilizers on growth characteristics of three wheat cultivars at the emergence period under greenhouse conditions

in order to investigate the effects of plant growth promoting bacteria on growth characteristic of wheat, an experiment was conducted at the research greenhouse, faculty of agriculture, ferdowsi university of mashhad, iran, in year 2009. a completely randomized design based on factorial arrangement (3×6) with three replications was used. the first factor consisted of three cultivars of wheat (chamran, sayonez and gaskogen) and the second one was biofertilizer types (phosphate suloblizing bacteria, biophosphore, nitroxin, nitragin, mixed and control). results showed that the effects of biofertilizers were significant on leaf area, root volume, shoot and root length criteria. moreover, the difference between cultivars on emergence rate, leaf area, leaf number per plant, leaf dry weight, total dry weight and leaf to root dry weight ratio, were significant. the highest and the lowest emergence rate were observed at gascogen (0.8 seed per 12 hour) and chamran (0.56 seed per 12 hour) cultivars, respectively. the interaction effects of wheat cultivars and biofertilizers were significant on all studied characteristics (emergence rate, leaf area, specific leaf area, leaf number per plant, leaf dry weight, root dry weight, total dry weight, leaf to root dry weight ratio, shoot length, root length, root to shoot length ratio, mean leaf length and root volume) unless emergence percentage. overall, our result indicated that biofertilizers had a useful and effective function on improvement of growth characteristics of wheat.