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Chernobyl wheat has higher than expected mutations
Chernobyl wheat has higher than
expected mutations
UK: October 5, 2000
LONDON - Fourteen years after the Chernobyl nuclear
disaster, wheat grown in Ukraine near the nuclear
power station is six times more likely to show
mutations than crops grown in uncontaminated soil,
scientists said yesterday.
A report in Nature journal by Olga Kovalchuk of the
Friedrich Miescher Institute at the Novartis Research
Foundation in Switzerland, and colleagues, compared a
wheat crop grown near Chernobyl with a genetically
identical crop 30 km (19 miles) away.
After one generation the Chernobyl crop showed a rate of
mutation six times higher than the crop grown in the clean
soil, the report said.
The scientists said the mutation rate was not in keeping
with the levels of radiation.
"We estimate that the wheat plants have been exposed to
relatively low doses of chronic irradiation. Theoretically
this
low-level exposure should not cause such a large increase
in the mutation rate," Kovalchuk and her colleagues said.
They concluded that the high mutation rate indictated that
"chronic exposure to ionizing radiation has effects that are
as yet unknown."
Further research was needed to analyse the genetic effects
of chronic radiation exposure, the scientists added.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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