Effect Of Salinity Stress On Morphological Characters Of Cuminum Cyminum And Valeriana Officinalis

High percent of medicines are used in developed countries have herbal origin. With regard to the development of saline lands and the shortage of agricultural lands, it comes into great importance to make use of salt tolerant plant. Cultivation of plants in hydroponic environment is a reliable and economical method in order to select the salt tolerant plant. An experiment was carried out in order to study the effect of different salinity levels on Cuminum cyminum and Valeriana officinalis in germination and seedling stages in a completely randomized design with four replications. The seed genotypes used were Mashhad, Serayan and Torbat-e-Jam. Salinity levels applied were zero (control), 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 mM. The result showed that by increasing salinity level percentage of germination, root length, shoot length, root dry weight, shoot dry weight, biomass, and shoot/root ratio decreased. This decrease was different among the studied plants and there was significant different between concentrations of salinity (p0.01). C. cyminum had a high tolerance to salinity in their germination and seedling stages phase, but V. officinalis showed sensitive to increased salinity in this phase. In this experiment, Serayan genotype was more salt tolerant than other genotypes.