Atomic gardening

Common card · No. 394972

Atomic gardening is a form of mutation breeding where plants are exposed to radiation. Some of the mutations produced thereby have turned out to be useful. Typically this is gamma radiation – in which case it is a gamma garden – produced by cobalt-60. The practice of plant irradiation has resulted in the development of more than 2,000 new varieties of plants, most of which are now used in agricultural production. One example is the resistance to verticillium wilt of the 'Todd's Mitcham' cultivar of peppermint, which was produced from a breeding and test program at Brookhaven National Laboratory from the mid-1950s. Additionally, the Rio Red Grapefruit, developed at the Texas A&M Citrus Center in the 1970s and approved in 1984, accounted for more than three quarters of the grapefruit produced in Texas by 2007.

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