> In explaining the results, Koga says that the plasma treatment speeds up the cell cycle so that the plant and seeds grow faster overall, with reactive oxygen species playing a key role in the effects.
Very cool! :)
> Nevertheless, Edward Bormashenko, professor of chemical engineering and biotechnology at Ariel University in Israel, says the situation was “more complicated than these results might indicate.” Pointing to his own team’s plasma research using seeds of lentils, beans, and wheat, he says: “There is no general approach available yet that can be applied to different kinds of seeds. Much depends on the types of seeds used, the conditions under which they geminate, and other factors.”
That is really cool, but I immediately have a follow-up question: given that plants also rely on a healthy soil ecosystem, which means symbiotic bacteria, and that this plasma treatment definitely will kill any trace bacteria on the skins of these cells, has it been explored if this has any effect?
Kind of like how you read all these stories of how the increase in C-sections results in a loss of transfer of healthy symbiotic bacteria from the mother to the child.
Ah, I feel a bit dumb for not realizing what kind of applications these would be, because I really should know better: back in 2002, when I still tried studying physics, I was part of a committee that organized a student symposium on biomedical technology. One of the speakers was Eva Stoffels, who had recently invented a low-energy plasma needle. Believe it or not, she claimed her motivation was ridding the world of the dental drill.
It's actually really interesting what you can do with plasma's in a biomedical context: bacteria are killed off really quickly by them because they lack a cell wall, without destroying human cells. At higher intensities, the plasma first breaks down the proteins connecting cells without killing them. At even higher intensities, they trigger apoptosis: programmed cell death without inflammations. Oh, and cancer cells are less resilient against them.
In the case of Stoffels' plasma needle, the idea was that it would destroy the infection while leaving healthy tissue intact. Not only that, her team found that the plasma's ionized the teeth in such a way that enamel production was increased. It sounded amazing at the time, but I guess it's hard to get this stuff out of the lab into the medical market though, since it has been over fifteen years now.
> bacteria are killed off really quickly by them because they lack a cell wall, without destroying human cells.
CORRECTION: I mixed up my terminology here. Bacteria have a cell wall (as do plants), human cells have a cell membrane[0][1]. But our cell membrane, as well as the cell wall of plant cells, are better at keeping the plasma ions out than the bacterial cell wall. In fact, the reason high plasma doses trigger apoptosis is because we actually use plasma ions as a cellular communication channel, IIRC. Would be hard to do that if our cells weren't protected against free plasma ions, right?
So the point still stands that bacteria die from plasma ion bombardment at doses that are harmless to human and plant cells.
You can't just casually mention this without further explanation! :D