Review: Seed Coating: Science or Marketing Spin? ($)

To meet the Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero hunger, degraded ecosystems should be brought under cultivation with quality seeds that have good germination and produce healthy seedling for vigorous plant population establishment. Seed technologies like seed coating with inoculants, germination promoters, protectants etc. should be applied in the quality seed production process, distribution and marketing. However, as per the opinion shared by Pedrini et al. (2017), this seed coating technology worth more than a billion dollars is mainly concentrated among a few transnational companies, with no public sharing of technologies by industry to academia. The authors studied and compared the ingredients, technologies, claims etc. of academia and industry, and found that the private sector tends to concentrate on mechanical properties and academia on the evaluation of the ingredients. The authors conclude that academia and industry should join hands and share their technologies and expertise and work for cost effective technologies for seedling establishment to help in maximizing the growth and yields and also to achieve the “cost-effective ecosystem recovery at the planetary scale.” (Summary by Sridhar Gutam) Trends Plant Sci. 10.1016/j.tplants.2016.11.002