The activity of NaN3 (0.5 millimolar), hydroxylamine-HCI (10-18 millimolar), and potassium cyanide (1 millimolar) as dormancy-breaking agents of dehulled red rice (Oryza sativa) is pH-dependent such that medium pH values favoring formation of the uncharged chemical species resulted in the highest germination percentages. There was no promotive effect of pH itself in the range of 3 to 10. The minimum contact times for maximum response (.:90% germination) to NaN3, KCN, and NH2OH-HCI are 8 hours at pH 4, 24 hours at pH 8, and 72 hours at pH 6 or 7, respectively, for exposure commencing at the start of imbibition. Dehulled seeds, imbibed first in water, show only slightly reduced germination when subsequently transferred to solutions of dormancybreaking chemicals.Intact seeds remain dormant in the presence of NaN3, KCN, or NH2-OH-HCI unless partially dry-afterripened. The pH dependence of these chemicals is reduced in intact, afterripening seeds.Azide, cyanide, and hydroxylamine are known dormancybreaking agents of seeds (2,3,7,8,10,11,(20)(21)(22)(23). In most cases, only partial germination of a highly viable seed population was observed after chemical treatment. However, in other studies, maximum dormancy-breaking activity of gibberellic acid (17), nitrite (5), and NO2 (6) was obtained with the incubation medium pH adjusted so that the undissociated form of each chemical was the most prevalent in solution. Considering the importance of solution pH for penetration and/or activity of weak acids and bases in a wide variety of situations (13)(14)(15)(16)19), it has been suggested that the incubation medium pH should be controlled when studying dissociable, dormancy-breaking chemicals (5).Another common problem is the lack of reproducibility of germination percentages between seed lots of different ages after chemical treatment. Very short periods of dry-afterripening have been shown to increase the sensitivity of red rice to nitrate, nitrite, and nitrogen dioxide (5, 6). Furthermore, in red rice, afterripening diminished the pH dependency necessary for nitrite activity (5). Afterripening-enhanced sensitivity to ethylene (1), nitrite, hydroxylamine (2), azide and cyanide (9) has been reported in other species as well.It is also fairly well established that extended imbibition of dormant seeds in water results in a loss of sensitivity to subsequently applied dormancy-breaking chemicals (8,12,18 loss of sensitivity to chemicals applied to red rice under these circumstances has been observed for kinetin and nitrite (4, 5).It was of interest to extend our recent observations concerning the effects of afterripening, H20 incubation, and incubation medium pH (5, 6) to other dormancy-breaking chemicals, particularly those with neutral and basic pKa values. In this report, we describe the response of intact and dehulled red rice to azide, cyanide, and hydroxylamine.MATERIALS AND METHODS Mature, strawhulled red rice (Oryza sativa) was obtained from fields adjacent to the Rice Experiment Station, Crowley, LA in 1982. H...