I have used Benomile and it worked for me

I used sodium hypochlorite NaClO for rape and also worked

Benomile can be successfully used in the tissue culture germination medium

I used sodium hypochlorite for clover seeds. Worked very well. Use approximately 7% of commercial bleach.

I am using sodium hypochlorite (80%) with 0.01% Triton-X-100 for surface sterilization and its working well.

Do you mean add the benomile into culture medium

@Tarek Noor: I think wat was ment by 7% is the amount of free chlorine "delivered" by the bleach.

We usually dillute the sodium hypochlorite (12% free Cl) down to 4% free Cl and use the dillution to suface sterilise flower buds and cuttings with great success (concerning contaminations ;).

Metaloxyl 10 ml or g/l media or any other systemic fungicide can reduce the contamination in you plant tissue culture media. Complete sterile condition is tough to achieve- once contamination commences.Germinate you seed in liquid germination medium containing systemic fungicide with lower number of seeds per petriplate. Say 5 seed/ plate immersed in above said medium after surface sterilization. Spread the seeds away from one another. Immediately after germination, separate the seedlings for further sub culturing- as the adjacent contaminated seed or seedling can spread its contamination. Other than seed explants continuous subculturing in 1% systemic fungicide can help to certain extent. If you are lucky you may achieve aseptic culture once again from a contaminated explant following the above concentration of any systemic fungicide. Prevention is better than cure...once contaminated you can also isolate a small untouched ( by fungus) part of you transformed arabidopsis plant in order to establish thefresh culture once again. Another better way to start with is use NaOCl 1% for surface sterilization in order to eliminate the surface contamination followed by 3 dist, water washes, following this surface washing with 1% (mind the concentration correctly) fungicide should be followed along with 3 dist. water washes then completely air dry the explant for 5-10 min, then only inoculate the explant back into a 0.2% systemic fungicide containing MS or any media. Try 10 explants separately among which you can only get one or two explants that are contamination free. Atleast you transformed event is resurrected...

Soaked seeds in fungicide or soaked with hydrogen per oxide 40% for 30 min

use bavistin in various concentrations (1 - 10 mg/L) for your study. I usually use this fungicide to treat my seeds for culture and wash your seeds with 0.05% mercuric chloride. this helps in removing fungus growing on your seeds.

@ Tarek Noor: Right, obviously I haven't read the answer by Mr Hussain thoroughly enough. By applying commercial bleach at 7% this will lead - as you already mentioned earlier - to a low concentration (1/10 my suggested concentration).

Have you tried microwave sterilisation of seed? I was sceptical at first, but it certainly works for tobacco, and according to articles from the web on Arabidopsis too.

http://www.protocolpedia.com/index.php?option=com_sobi2&sobi2Task=sobi2Details&catid=19&sobi2Id=612&Itemid=81

Certainly much quicker and easier than dealing with liquid sterilants

we sterilize seeds before germination so don't need anything to be added to medium, we soak seeds for 7 minutes in a commercial Procter&Gamble bleach "Ace" (the one with chlorine, which you can get from every ordinary shop) diluted 1:1 with distiled water, afterwards we wash seeds (preferably with stirring) 15 times in distiled water for 2 min every time :) the simplest methods usually are the best ;)

http://www.e-senukai.lt/out/1/html/0/dyn_images//z1/0000014308271430827_z1.jpg

Mercuric chloride is a dangerous compound that invariably gets into the environment. It was banned from agriculture by FAO in 1973, Yet tissue culturists keep using it because they refer to older publications. I suggest that it should also be banned from the TC world as an obsolete and dangerous compound.

In Practice:

We compared sterilants: calcium hypochorite, 70% ethanol, hydrogen peroxide and mercuric chloride. Mercuric chloride was phytotoxic and not very effective. Calcium hypochlorite was the most effective and was not phytotoxic. It is also cheap and accessible.

Calcium (or sodium) hypochlorite is very effective for Arabidopsis seeds, you can use 1:3 times dilution with water. 0.1% of the Tween-20 will help a lot to get better results. However, if seeds were heavy contaminated with fungi, you can apply 0.1% mercuric chloride for not more than 2 minutes (after 70% ethanol). This way you will kill all of the fungi, even if they in spores stage. Hypocholorite is not so effective against spores.

For the other bigger seeds like Medicago, in many case only mercuric chloride will give you good results.

Davis, A. M., Hall, A., Millar, A. J., Darrah, C., and Davis, S. J. (2009) Streamlined sub-protocols for floral-dip transformation and selection of transformants in Arabidopsis thaliana. Plant Methods 5: 3

Surface sterilization with  mercuric chloride gives good results, provided due care of concentration and time of exposure is taken. It could be toxic as well, otherwise.