Plasma treatments help lentil seeds improve water uptake and germination

Plant and seed companies often use different types of priming processes to improve the viability and yield of their seeds. One modern approach is dry atmospheric plasma priming (DAPP), which applies plasma to seeds to modify their growth parameters without the need for more traditional treatments that are often messier and more time-consuming. However, the seeds’ ability to maintain the benefits gained by DAPP over a long period has not been previously studied.

Dufour et al. monitored lentil seeds treated with different types of plasmas for 45 days. The authors packed lentil seeds into a dielectric barrier device and exposed them to plasmas consisting of helium, helium and nitrogen, or helium and oxygen for several minutes. After storing the treated seeds for varying periods up to 45 days, they soaked the seeds with water to observe the changes in germination among the seed batches previously treated with the different mixtures.

When plasmas consisting of a mixture of helium and nitrogen were used, the authors found long-lifespan reactive molecules diffused into the seeds, which increased the water uptake and reduced the germination time by up to eight hours. Notably, these effects remained stable over several weeks.

“For greenhouse crops, this therefore amounts to increasing the rate of cultivation by 25%, de facto guaranteeing a substantial increase in profitability,” said author Thierry Dufour. “The use of cold plasmas for agriculture presents, therefore, very promising economic assets.”

Currently, the technique can only treat a few hundred seeds at a time, but the group is developing a prototype to ensure processing rates in line with the needs of seed companies.

Source: “Sustainable improvement of seeds vigor using dry atmospheric plasma priming: Evidence through coating wettability, water uptake and plasma reactive chemistry,” by T. Dufour, Q. Gutierrez, and C. Bailly, Journal of Applied Physics (2021). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0037247 .

This paper is part of the Fundamentals and Applications of Atmospheric Pressure Plasmas Collection, learn more here .