Fig. 1

Germination percentage (A) and protocorm size (B) of Vanilla planifolia after different treatments of seeds measured 5 months after sowing. Immature seeds excerpted from surface sterilized unripe pods served as a positive control as they lack dormancy. Mature seeds treated with chlorinated lime represent conventional treatment published before. The cultures were incubated asymbiotically on medium BM1 at 30 °C in dark. Pepsin was used in concentration 0.5 g/100 ml. Different letters indicate significantly different groups of data according to the result of post-hoc multiple comparison test (α = 0.05). Boxplots compose of whiskers (minimum and maximum), edges of the box (lower and upper quartiles), dividing line (median) and points (outliers). Number of measured objects and other statistics can be found in Additional file 2: Table S1. Only those experimental variants that yielded a reasonable number of protocorms are included in (B)