Seed priming as a strategy to enhance crop resilience under abiotic stress conditions

Abiotic stresses such as drought, salinity, heat, and chilling have continuously threatened crop productivity. With changing climate and increasing anthropogenic activities, the frequency and intensity of abiotic stresses has increased manyfold. Among the available agronomic approaches, seed priming has emerged as a simple, low-cost, and practical pre-sowing strategy to improve abiotic stress tolerance in field crops. This review summarizes main seed priming techniques such as hydropriming, osmopriming, halopriming, hormopriming, and nutripriming used in improving abiotic stress tolerance in field crops. It also highlights advancements in seed priming techniques in the form of biopriming and nanopriming. It further identifies the major physiological and biochemical mechanism that imparts abiotic stress tolerance, including faster and more uniform germination, improved membrane stability, enhanced antioxidant defense, better osmotic adjustment, efficient reserve mobilization, improved nutrient and ion regulation, and activation of stress-responsive pathways. Evidence indicates that effectiveness of seed priming varies with crop species, genotype, priming method, and stress severity. In many cases, the strongest effects are observed during germination and early seedling growth, while translation into final yield improvement remains less consistent under field conditions. This review also highlights major research gaps, including lack of protocol standardization, limited field-scale validation, inadequate understanding of molecular mechanisms, uncertainty regarding storage behavior of primed seeds, and insufficient attention to combined stresses. Overall, seed priming represents a promising climate-resilient tool for field crops, but its wider agronomic adoption will require more targeted, crop-specific, and field-oriented research.