ABSTRACT
Although pre-harvest sprouting in cereals has a common biological background, the consequences of such damage have vastly different effects in the various cereal industries depending on use and on technology. The seed and the malting industries depend not only on the germination rate per se but as much on the necessity that the seeds which germinate produce vigorously growing seedlings. The key character is vitality. Obviously pre-harvest sprouted kernels tend to give less percentage of seeds which germinate - it is difficult for a seed to germinate twice with an intercepted desiccation - but what is equally important, the character of sprouted kernels might be indirectly correlated to weather conditions, microbiological infection and /or variety which might be important for seed viability and storage life of the remaining seeds in the batch which do not show any sign of sprouting.
