Seeds are outstandingly important – most plants propagate via seeds and for many crops, e.g. cereals and oil seeds, the seeds are the essential part of the harvest.
Determining the seed quality is a key step in plant research, seed breeding, seed production, seed trade, and seed storage and maintenance in gene banks. This implies the properties of the seed as such as well as germination characteristics, together with tests for purity or weed contamination in seed batches.
Many protocols are available that determine how to test the seed features, seed batch properties, seed germination, or seedling emergence. Common for all these protocols are visual inspections of the samples. Whereas general testing protocols usually are designed to allow experts to work without requiring complex technical equipment, digital seed testing tools improve and accelerate the testing process.
Testing protocols can be institute- or company-specific, but frequently seed testers use guidelines issued by ISTA, AOSA-SCST or seed regulatory agencies. Testing protocols aim at establishing comparable seed quality determination procedures.
An important task in seed testing is the quality determination of the seedlings. For seedling emergence assays, but also for paper-based germination assays, it is not only important to know what percentage of seeds do germinate, but particularly how many of them deliver normal, usable plants. Such normal, or usable seedlings grow well and have the expected phenotypic appearance, and they do not exhibit defects, deformations, or infestations.