Effects of Low-Pressure Radiofrequency Capacitively Coupled Plasma Treatment of Thai Purple Glutinous Rice Seeds on Phenotypic and Genotypic Modifications

This study is aimed at investigating effects of low-pressure radiofrequency capacitively coupled plasma (RF-CCP) treatment of rice (<i>Oryza sativa</i>. Leum Pua) seeds on phenotypic and genotypic modifications. In exploring the effect of the gas type on the seed texture, nitrogen (N), argon (Ar), helium (He) and oxygen (O) are used as the source gases in the plasma treatment of the seeds, respectively, with a fixed treatment time of 5 minutes for each experiment. The result show that only O-plasma causes cracks on the rice seed surface, but no phenotypic change of the grown rice is observed. Subsequently, the treatment time duration effect on the seed growing is studied using the O-plasma. The germination rates after the O-plasma treatment for 15, 25 and 30 minutes are about 50, 23 and 20 percentage, respectively. At the 30-minute treatment, one rice seedling shows phenotypic changes in short stem and green color in the leaf and pale in the rice husk. High annealing temperature-random amplified polymorphic DNA (HAT-RAPD) is used to analyze genetic variation between the mutant and control rice. Among 10 arbitrary primers, 3 primers reveal genetic modification in the rice mutant induced by the RF-CCP treatment.