Abstract
“Dry” or dormant biological systems such as bacterial spores, cysts of brine shrimp and seeds of higher plants have been extensively used as test organisms in radiobiological studies. In particular, experiments conducted with the bacterial spore have contributed much to our knowledge of certain radiobiological concepts (see ref. 39 for a review). Plant seeds have been used in similar studies and although inferior to the bacterial spore in population size which can be studied, the seed has several advantages. It represents a multicellular organism with a complex chromosome structure and in addition to reduced survival (the only kind of damage studied in the spore) other radiobiological end-points such as mutations, chromosome aberrations and growth reduction can be readily measured.
Published with the permission of the Dean of the University of Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Operated by the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station for the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission under Contract No. AT-40-GEN-242. Research supported in part by Hatch Project TEN00287.
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Conger, B.V. (1972). Contributions of Seed Meristems to Radiobiology. In: Miller, M.W., Kuehnert, C.C. (eds) The Dynamics of Meristem Cell Populations. Advances in Experimental Medicine and Biology, vol 18. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3207-7_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-3207-7_15
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