2017/07/17 by A. P. Møller, Anders Pape Møller, Timothy A. Mousseau +1 · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Environmental Science · #Plant Genetic and Mutation Studies #Plant and animal studies #Radioactive contamination and transfer
paper · doi:10.1086/692763
openalex publication_date 2017/07/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Premise of research. Low-dose ionizing radiation (LDIR) can generate deleterious mutations that may have significant negative impact on life-history traits.Methodology. Here we quantified the germination rate of seeds of 25 species of plants from multiple sampling locations at Chernobyl when grown under similar (controlled, nonirradiated, common garden) greenhouse conditions.Pivotal results. We found a significant negative relationship between the germination rate of seeds in an uncontaminated common garden and ambient radiation in the field from which seeds were collected with an overall intermediate effect size. Although there was significant variation in the effect of radiation on germination rate among taxa, we found no significant effect of radiation due to genome size, number of chromosomes, level of ploidy, or seeds that originated from pollination by bi- or trinucleate pollen grains. Seed weight was significantly reduced in sites with higher radiation (0.03–129.1 μSv/h). There was a significant effect of radiation by seed weight interaction on germination rate.Conclusions. The effect of LDIR on pollen viability was positively correlated with the effect of radiation on germination rate, suggesting that a common underlying factor, most probably deleterious mutations, accounted for this common negative impact of radiation on both pollen viability and germination rate.