Abstract
Mutant plants are useful tools, not only as parents of new cultivars, but also as materials for clarifying physiological mechanisms. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) has been an excellent model system for analysis of plant mechanism, which cannot easily be studied in Arabidopsis or rice. To obtain information on these mechanisms, we induced mutations in the tomato cultivar 'Micro-Tom' by irradiation with accelerated heavy ions. It is reported that irradiation with accelerated heavy ions is more effective per dose in creating mutations in plants than irradiation with other sources and is suggested that mutagenesis by accelerated heavy ions could be uniquely used for both forward and reverse genetics in plants.
In attempt to find the conditions for high efficient mutagenesis, we start to investigate the dose-, the ion species- and the linear energy transfer (LET)-dependence of survival rate and the appearance of mutants.
This work carried out under the NIVTS Priority Research Program and Strategic Promotion Program for Basic Nuclear Research by Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.
