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. 2017 Aug 15;7:8263. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-08669-5

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© The Author(s) 2017

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Proposed mechanism of AgNPs induced seed germination of rice. (a) Seed without AgNPs priming treatment has low metabolic activity due to slow water uptake; in this condition, the hydrolysis of starch occur gradually and thus available sugars is also low in the initial phase of imbibition, resulting in slow seed germination and seedling growth. (b) Seed priming with AgNPs can enhance seed germination with at least three possible scenarios. Firstly, AgNPs could penetrate seed coat by interacting with cell walls of seed coat to create small pores and thus enhance water uptake into seeds. Rapid water uptake can induce higher metabolic activity and starch hydrolysis of seed during initial phase of imbibition. Secondly, penetrated AgNPs could interact with α-amylase as NPs-amylase complex to fasten the starch hydrolysis and thus seed can generate higher available sugars to support embryo growth. Thirdly, AgNPs could mediate generation of ROS being in oxidative window range for acting as signalling molecules and participating in cell wall loosening and endosperm weakening. See texts for further explanation.