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Former Atomic Gardening Society President Muriel Howorth shows popular garden writer Beverley Nichols a two-foot-high (61 cm) peanut plant grown from an irradiated nut in her own backyard. Atomic gardening is a form of mutation breeding where plants are exposed to radiation. Some of the mutations produced thereby have turned out to be useful.
The mutations produced by this technique vary with each generation, meaning further breeding of these mutated plants could produce new mutations. Traditionally, gamma radiation is used on solely adult plants, and not on pollen. The irradiation of mature pollen allows mutant plants to grow without being in direct contact with gamma radiation ...
These types of mutations are usually prompted by environmental causes, such as ultraviolet radiation or any exposure to certain harmful chemicals, and can cause diseases including cancer. [91] With plants, some somatic mutations can be propagated without the need for seed production, for example, by grafting and stem cuttings.
A Brazilian study in a hill in the state of Minas Gerais which has high natural radiation levels from uranium deposits, has also shown many radioresistant insects, worms and plants. [2] [3] Certain extremophiles, such as the bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans and the tardigrades, can withstand large doses of ionizing radiation on the order of ...
One environmental scientist, speaking with Science News, says that these studies can be tricky business, largely due to the fact that sussing out radiation-induced mutations from other effects ...
In such methods, cells or organisms are exposed to mutagens such as UV radiation or mutagenic chemicals, and mutants with desired characteristics are then selected. Hermann Muller discovered in 1927 that X-rays can cause genetic mutations in fruit flies, [6] and went on to use the mutants he created for his studies in genetics. [7]
An evolutionary radiation is an increase in taxonomic diversity that is caused by elevated rates of speciation, [1] that may or may not be associated with an increase in morphological disparity. [2] A significantly large and diverse radiation within a relatively short geologic time scale (e.g. a period or epoch ) is often referred to as an ...
Adaptive radiation is not a strictly vertebrate phenomenon, and examples are also known from among plants. The most famous example of adaptive radiation in plants is quite possibly the Hawaiian silverswords , named for alpine desert-dwelling Argyroxiphium species with long, silvery leaves that live for up to 20 years before growing a single ...