Electrifying greenhouse agriculture: Cold atmospheric pressure plasma technology for Pythium ultimum control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hydroponic growth of food plants in greenhouses is of rapidly increasing importance to assure future autonomy of food supply, especially in harsher climate zones. Greenhouse culture yields are drastically reduced by pathogenic microorganisms that cause root rot in plants. In Canada, the fungus Pythium ultimum, which can survive harsh winter conditions, has a particularly large impact on food production. In this work, we present cold physical plasma treatment of liquids with a gliding arc plasma as a novel approach for combating pythium growth in liquid media. This study is based on exploring air or other N 2 + O 2 mixtures as a parameter to identify which plasma treatment is best suited for its anti-fungal activity in different media. If sourced from renewable energy and water, the proposed treatment is intrinsically sustainable. 3 media conditions are explored: first distilled water, to identify the production of highly reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS). Second, an inoculated distilled water is used in conjunction with an ELISA assay as a quick response indicator. Third, a Sabouroud 2 % dextrose broth, is used as a culture media in which oomycetes are grown subsequent to plasma treatment, and hyphal mass is compared between untreated and treated samples. Extracting a subset of 80+ chemical reactions from the available literature and databases, a reaction scheme is proposed accounting for liquid-vapor equilibria (through Henry’s coefficients) and reaction rate analysis. The most promising plasma treatment condition was found to be using a 95 % N 2 : 5 % O 2 gas mixture with a treatment time of 30 min, reducing hyphal mass growth from 1.8 g to 0.4 g over 1 week in Sabouroud broth. The pythium degradation process was observed through scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis, showing that Sporangium or oogonia containing structures that terminate the pythium’s hyphae have been broken and significantly reduced after plasma treatment. • Inactivation of Pythium ultimum by cold plasma technology for the first time in industry relevant medium. • First mechanistic study on inactivation of oomycetes. • Optimization of reactivity and antifungal activity of plasma by gas composition control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".