EFFECT OF SEED-ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS ON GENETIC UNIFORMITY PERFORMANCE OF EGGPLANT (Solanum melongena) AND SWEET PEPPER (Capsicum annum) LOCAL CULTIVARS.

This study discussed two aspects, an economic and academic aspect. The economic aspect aimed to developing agricultural technologies is simple, low cost and low risk intervention, where poor farmers could make improvements without incurring additional costs. The academic aspect aimed to (I) studying the seed– environmental factors effect (hydro–priming as a model) on genetic variance, residual error variance, precisions of statistical testing procedures and biases the estimates of heritability which effect on selection efficiency; (II) Improving the homogeneity of eggplant and sweet pepper local cultivars by seed hydro-priming treatments; (III) Occurring of difference between protein bands caused by seed hydro-priming treatments could cause conflict of variety identifying through protein electrophoresis; (IV) Evaluate of hydro-priming effect on seed storage and viability and (V) Determine relationship between descriptive, Quantitative characteristics and rogueing (weeding out no typical individuals from a crop plants or field). To achieve these goals, eggplant and sweet pepper local cultivars were used in this study (separated experiments). Seeds were divided into five sub-samples, one of which was kept as untreated control and four other samples were incubated in distilled water at 25oC for 12, 24, 36 and 48 hours (hydro-priming treatments). To determine the genetic parameters, the plants (for each crop) were divided into two populations, mother population and treated population. The SDS page gel was used in the separation of proteins. Results showed that (I) The seed-environmental factors (seed hydro-priming as a model) revealed changes in population homogeneity at field conditions, the best minimum values of homogeneity index (more homogenous) to most characteristics were obtained by 48h seed-priming treatment in eggplant local cultivar. While in the pepper, the best minimum values of homogeneity index to characteristics of seedling stage were obtained by 48h seed hydro-priming treatment; besides, the best values in case of vegetative, flower and yield stages were obtained by 24 seed hydro-priming treatment; (II) The hydro-Priming treatments (as seed-environmental factor) had effected the results of trait performance and led to changes in residual error variance, which reduces the power of statistical tests and biases the estimates of heritability. These results could lead to reducing selection efficiency; (III) Rogueing practice is reliable only in the case of descriptive traits; (IV) seed-environmental factors (seed hydro-priming as a model) led to specific differences related to induce proteins. This suggests that the use of the electrophoretic pattern was able to distinguish within the close together population as affected by seed–environmental factors and (V) These results indicated that the seed storage period was not critical for eggplant local cultivar seeds affected by hydropriming treatments up to 18 months, while in case of sweet pepper local cultivar was up to 12 months. The results had revealed that there a very tight relationship between the environmental factors related to seeds and the plant phenotypic and genotypic performance which reflected on the yield and efficiency of genetic parameters that playing a big role in determining the efficiency of line selection.