Fig. 6

Impacts of seed biopriming on plant growth and development in pot experiments. The experiments were conducted for 4 months, dividing into seedling (day 0–14), tillering (day 30–60), flowering (day 75–100), and harvesting (day 120) phases of rice cultivation. The height of rice plants (a) was measured at every phase. At the harvesting stage, the numbers of tillers (b) and panicles (c) per hill, the weight of 1000 healthy rice grains (d), and the percentage of healthy rice yield (e) were quantified. The tests are the rice plants arising from unhealthy seeds (UHS) biopriming with any selected bacteria, and those emerging from non-treated (No) or hydroprimed healthy seeds (HS) and UHS plus benomyl-treated UHS are controls. There was no significant difference across the results from different bacterial isolates tested. We, therefore, calculated the global mean value of all data derived from bioprimed tests as one. Error bars are mean values ± SDs of at least 20 replicated measurements. The statistical differences of means compared by one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc test at P ≤ 0.05 are indicated with small case letters for any tests and controls (within the same priming duration), and with the Roman numbers for the comparison of means at different phases in (a)