Does the Cryopreservation Improve the Quality of Tomato Seeds?

The use of high quality sowing material is the fundamental condition for good yielding of crop plants. In this study we determined the productivity of plants, obtaned from cryopreserved tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) seeds. The seeds (cultivars Seven, Potiron Ecarlate and Druzhba) were placed into 1.8 ml cryovials and directly immersed into liquid nitrogen on month. The seeds were planted in soil and grown in a greenhouse without heating. Seedlings were planted in open ground in May. The increase in total and marketable yields for the plants grown from the cryopreserved seeds cv. ‘Seven’ was 351 and 268 % respectively, compared with the control, the mass of one fruit and their number also was greater. For cv. ‘Potiron Ecarlate’ the trading productivity increased in 220 %, the weight of one fruit was significantly lower for plants grown from cryopreserved seeds; the number of fruits per plant was significantly higher. It was shown that for the cv. ‘Druzhba’ the data of total and trading yield increased in 27.8 and 71.9 % respectively, number of fruits per plant was significantly higher. The height of plants and number of internodes for all cultivars did not change significantly. The total number of diseased plants decreased by 33 % for the cv. ‘Seven’, for ‘Potiron Ecarlate’ it did by 6.7 %, for the ‘Druzhba’ the total percentage of sick and healthy plants did not differ after seeds cryopreservation.