3.1. Growth and yield quality
To evaluate the effect of water stress levels in the reproductive phase, we defined three levels of drought (75, 50, 25% FC) for oilseed Camelina in first year. Ultimately results showed that high level of stress (25% FC) disrupted many flower buds and weren’t collected enough seed for all of our analyses. So, we followed our experiment without this level of drought.
Analysis variance indicated that water-deficient during the reproductive phase significantly affected growth and seed traits (Table 2). Water stress showed no significant difference in the plant length. The number of branches increased by approximately 91.7% in B1D2 but remained the same in the other treatments compared with control. The strongest decrease in seed number (17%), silique number (9%) and silique length (12.5%) were found under stress treated-plant in comparison to control. As shown in Table 2, the highest increase in seed number and silique number were with 10.3, 10.41% respectively in PGPB treated-plants. It shows that both of the seed and silique number are in a line under water deficit and inoculation with PGPB.
Water deficient adversely increased seeds’ weight. As the highest seed weight is due to inoculated (40%) and non-inoculated (31.8%) plants under the water deficit (Table 2). As illustrated in Fig 1A, there is a negative correlation between oil content and seed weight. Adversely, seed weight with protein and TSC was in a line (Fig 1B, C).