Plant beneficial microbes can boost plant immunity and growth.
They are usually applied to young plants, but I want to apply them to seeds.
With tomato seeds its easy to apply fungal spores to the seeds. Vortex. Dry. Plant
With small Arabidopsis seeds (col 0) , its a bit more tricky. They are smaller, have less surface area and weigh around 20mg for 1000 seeds.
What techniques have you used to treat Arabidopsis seeds or other small seeds with microbial agents?
Description below may be useful:
i. Seed roll technique: Seeds may be rolled on 7-10 days old culture of fungi on the culture Petri plate, and Petri plate rotated in both clockwise and anticlockwise so that seed surface get covered by spore. The pathogen coated seeds are kept for germination on blotter paper, and then are kept in an incubator at 28- 30oC for about ten days.
ii. Seed soaking technique: This method is followed as paper towel technique. The fungus is cultured on Potato Dextrose Broth (PDB). Twenty ml of PDB is poured into 100 ml conical flasks and sterilized. The flasks are then inoculated and incubated for around ten days. The mycelial mat from the flask is removed and macerated in a warring blender along with distilled water for a minute. The inoculum is later collected in a beaker. In the meantime, seeds are immersed completely in the inoculum. These seeds are then placed side by side on a blotter paper (45cmx25cm with one fold) and are folded. The folded blotter papers are then placed in trays, and kept in an incubator at 28-30oC for around ten days.
For support: http://medcraveonline.com/APAR/APAR-06-00198.pdf
For clover seeds, we mixed the fungal spores with finely ground peat and pelleted the seed in a concrete mixer. Maybe you can use a lapidary tumbler for smaller batches.
Pablo Díaz-Rueda , Carlos M. Rivero-Núñez and Procopio Peinado-Torrubia if you have ever thought about inoculating At seeds with fungal spores, check out Mohammod Hossain's reply
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