Various approaches of cold plasma treatment to brewer's rice plant for improvement of grain quality

The applications of cold plasma in agriculture have much attention. We have investigated the efficacy of cold plasma treatment in the field for rice cultivation. We focused on the rice cultivation process of brewer’s cultivar in this study, and treated not only the seedlings in a paddy but also the spikelets, using rice plants cultivated in the University paddy field in Togo town, Aichi, with cold plasma; direct plasma irradiation and indirect treatment with plasma-activated Ringer’s lactate solution. As a result of evaluating the quality of brown rice after harvest, in any ways, the ratio of white-core grains, which is the important structure for brewing Japanese wine (sake), to the whole ones was increased under the optimal condition. These results indicated that the various approaches of plasma treatment according to the rice cultivation can improve the quality of brown rice.