Advances in seed science and technology

Abstract

The seed is the most basic and important agricultural capital goods, and seed quality is important for agricultural production. Most methods presently used for seed quality detecting were destructive, slow and needed pretreatment, therefore, developing advanced methods has rapid, great significance for seed quality testing. The classical methods for detecting seed viability are time consuming and frequently cause seed damage and unwanted germination. It is a a novel micro-optrode technique (MOT) to measure seed viability in a quick and non-invasive manner by measuring the oxygen influxes of intact seeds, approximately 10 seconds to screen one seed. Thus, MOT is a reliable, quick, and low-cost seed viability detecting technique Multispectral imaging is a supervised classification model, based on nCDA transformation between viable and dead seeds, was built and tested on a new set of seeds. Here the prediction of viable and dead seeds resulted in 96% correct classified seeds, and confirm the potential of using multispectral vision technology in seed quality testing. The benefit of using multispectral imaging in comparison to instruments such as single seed NIR or IR, is the possibility to measure the multiple components by reflection from both visual and NIR wavelengths. Hence information of many valuable seed quality traits can be extracted in one single measurement. Cold plasma is an emerging non thermal technology primarily used for microbial disinfection and surface modification. The principle of plasma surface modification is exploited in food and agriculture for enhance of seed germination and other reasons. The aim of the present review is to give some insights on cold plasma technology exploitation for enhancement of seed germination. The seed germination rate can be increased on application of cold plasma by both direct and indirect treatments. The synergistic effect of cold plasma can replace the traditional seed disinfection solutions and chemical seed germination enhancers.