Physiological Alterations and Nondestructive Test Methods of Crop Seed Vigor: A Comprehensive Review

Seed vigor is one of the essential contents of agricultural research. The decline of seed vigor is described as an inevitable process. Recent studies have shown that the oxidative damage caused by reactive oxygen species (ROS) is the main reason for the destruction of various chemicals in seeds and eventually evolves into seed death. The traditional vigor tests, such as the seed germination test and TTC staining, are commonly used to assess seed vigor. However, these methods often need a large number of experimental samples, which will bring a waste of seed resources. At present, many new methods that are fast and nondestructive to seeds, such as vibrational spectroscopic techniques, have been used to test seed vigor and have achieved convincing results. This paper is aimed at analyzing the microchanges of seed-vigor decline, summarizing the performance of current seed-vigor test methods, and hoping to provide a new idea for the nondestructive testing of a single seed vigor by combining the physiological alterations of seeds with chemometrics algorithms.