The Korean Journal of Crop Science ISSN:0252-9777(Print) 2287-8432(Online) 한국작물학회지

Seed disinfection is a necessary process to decrease Bakanae disease in rice and is carried out at 30°C to increase disinfection efficiency. However, the length of sprout after seed disinfection is not suitable for sowing, so additional processes such as seed soaking is needed. For this reason, this study was conducted to develop the efficient and effective seed disinfection method. When the seed disinfection finished after soaking seeds in cold water for 2 days, length of sprout was about 1.0 mm and sowing can be done without additional processes. In addition, the incidence of Bakanae disease was greatly reduced by 64% compared to conventional method. In order to find out why the newly developed method (disinfection after soaking) is more efficient than conventional method, soaked and not soaked seeds were stained using methylene blue staining. It was found that soaked seeds were more easily stained with about 50% of internal and external endosperm stained. Therefore, pesticide can be absorbed easily into internal endosperm of soaked seeds and efficiently destroy the spore of pathogen. As a results of this study, newly developed method will be useful as it can improve efficiency of agricultural work and also effectively decrease Bakanae disease compared to conventional method.