RE: "special plants"

["Colvett, Robert D." <rdcolvett@tva.gov>]

Many careers ago, I worked in the presence of some folks who were
using tradescantia [spiderwort] for exploring RBE's and oxygen effects
on somatic mutations.  In these plants, there are some mutations
that will change the size and/or color of the cells in stamen hairs in
scoreable ways.  The advantage of this as a test system for low doses
was that a performable experiment could score 10^5 + cells.  In this case,
'low dose' was 1-ish rads for photons, fraction of rad for neutrons.

Almost everything was critical and had to be controlled for -- temperature,
soil pH, light, stage of plant maturity at time of exposure, time delay
before
scoring, clonal ancestry of the test population.

I put +tradescantia +radiation into altavista, and found a few useful
	comments.

	r dee colvett

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