Developing non-thermal extraction method has become an emerging interest among researchers since many of the plant-based bioactive components are heat-sensitive. Cold plasma is regarded as a novel non-thermal food processing technology that currently applied in food to inactivate pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms on the surface of meats, poultry, fruits, and vegetables. Cold plasma contains energetic, reactive ionized gas that allows it to possess strong surface etching and striping ability through inducing rapid chemical reactions. Ginseng is a slow-growing perennial plant and has been used as herbal medicine since 2000 years ago. Many studies have reported that ginseng contains a wide variety of biologically active constituents such as ginsenosides. In this work, a novel extraction technology assisted by cold plasma is developed using ginseng as modeling system, from which the efficiency of such method to extract the bioactive components from the solid plant matrix is evaluated. Fresh ginseng was sliced into pieces, each of which is 2 mm, and then randomly divided into three experimental groups. In the first group, fresh ginseng was simply dried using conventional oven. The second group was processed by steaming and drying following the traditional procedure that produced red ginseng known to have better bioactivity. The third group is first treated by cold plasma and then dried at conditions similar to the two previous groups. Later, the surface of ginseng slices were studied using scanning electron microscopy(SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR). Later, all prepared slices were extracted with 70% ethanol for 24 hour in the shaking incubator at 70°C. The extracts were then filtered and the bioactive components were determined by HPLC. The results showed that the chemical properties of ginseng surface were modified by plasma treatment and the concentration of ginsenosides extracted were significantly higher compared to untreated groups (white ginseng or red ginseng). According to the result, cold plasma is definitely a good potential technology to be developed into a novel non-thermal extraction processing from plant-based materials. Therefore, this present work would definitely lay the important fundamentals for the future application of cold plasma technology in extraction related processing.

Atmospheric cold plasma causing chemical and physical changes on ginseng surface increasing yield of ginsenosides extraction

254th National Meeting (2017)

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