Thiourea and hydrogen peroxide priming improved K retention and source-sink relationship for mitigating salt stress in rice.

Plant bioregulators (PBRs) represent low-cost chemicals for boosting plant defense, especially under stress conditions. In the present study, redox based PBRs such as thiourea (TU; a non-physiological thiol-based ROS scavenger) and hydrogen peroxide (HO; a prevalent biological ROS) were assessed for their ability to mitigate NaCl stress in rice variety IR 64. Despite their contrasting redox chemistry, TU or HO supplementation under NaCl [NaCl + TU (NT) or NaCl + HO (NH)] generated a reducing redox environment in planta, which improved the plant growth compared with those of NaCl alone treatment.