Emerging Plasma Technology That Alleviates Crop Stress During the Early Growth Stages of Plants: A Review

Abstract

Crops during their early growth stages are vulnerable to a wide range of environmental stressors; thus, earlier seed invigoration and seedling establishment are essential in crop production. As an alternative to synthetic chemical treatments, plasma technology could be one of the emerging technologies to enhance seed germination and seedling vigor by managing environmental stressors. Recent studies have shown its beneficial effects in various stress conditions, suggesting that plasma treatment can be used for early crop stress management. This paper reviewed the effects of different types of plasma treatments on plant responses in terms of the seed surface environment (seed scarification and pathogen inactivation) and physiological processes (an enhanced antioxidant system and activated defense response) during the early growth stages of plants. As a result, plasma treatment can enhance seed invigoration and seedling establishment by alleviating the adverse effects of environmental stressors such as drought, salinity, and pathogen infection. More information on plasma applications and their mechanisms against a broad range of stressors is required to establish a better plasma technology for early crop stress management.

Plasma-Activated Water Triggers Rapid and Sustained Cytosolic Ca2+ Elevations in Arabidopsis thaliana

“…In the last few years there has been a surge of papers in the field of cold plasma technology. Several studies have addressed the effects of the administration of PAW to plants, concerning the promotion of growth and development [5,8,16], as well as the induction of defence responses (see [5,9,14,16] for reviews).…”

“…The complex chemistry occurring during the PAW generation has recently attracted a great deal of interest due to a variety of applications in agriculture and in the food sector [2][3][4][5]. In plant biology, cold plasma and PAW have been shown to increase the seed germination rate, even under osmotic and saline stresses, as well as to promote plant growth [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Moreover, PAW irrigation of tomato plants has been reported to induce defence gene expression [12,13] and accumulation of the defence hormones salicylic acid and jasmonic acid [12,14].…”

Plasma-assisted agriculture: history, presence, and prospects—a review

“…The future of low-temperature plasma science and technology was most recently considered systematically in a series of future trends in plasma science reviews [88][89][90][91]. Furthermore, the indisputable potential of nonequilibrium plasmas as enabling media for various plasma-assisted applications in agriculture and food production chains has been elaborated through many topical reviews [21,[92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105]. Many studies have shown that the use of low-temperature plasmas improves various steps in the agri-food value chain.…”

The Effect of Gaseous Ozone Generated by Surface Dielectric Barrier Discharge on the Decay and Quality of Stored Onion Bulbs

“…Gaseous ozone treatment can be an alternative to sulfur fumigation as a way of preserving onion bulbs during cold storage. The gaseous ozone is easily generated when a high voltage discharge is applied to the electrodes in air [8,9]. Due to its high oxidation capacity, gaseous ozone treatment has been a tool for microbial decontamination of fruits and vegetables [10][11][12].…”