Rice Bran Researched as Source for Antimicrobial, Biodegradable Food Packaging Film

Sep 17, 2026

By John Lovett

Rice bran is a plentiful agricultural byproduct that is often underused, but research out of the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station shows it could be a source for biodegradable food packaging with built-in antibacterial properties.

Antimicrobial resistance is a significant global health threat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the United States alone, more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year.

For the past year, with funding support from the Arkansas Biosciences Institute, a multidisciplinary team of scientists led by Mahfuzur Rahman has explored how plasma technology could contribute to new antimicrobial strategies. The team is using plasma, a state of matter visible in natural phenomena such as the Northern Lights, to improve the value-added capabilities of rice bran and rice bran protein.

Rahman is an assistant professor in the department of food science for the experiment station, the research arm of the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

The research showed that treating a clear film made from rice bran protein with argon-generated cold plasma inhibited foodborne bacterial pathogens including E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium known for its antibiotic resistance.

Source : uada.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids