Wednesday October 4 3:56 PM ET
Chernobyl Wheat Has Higher Than Expected
Mutations 

LONDON (Reuters) - Fourteen years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster,
wheat grown in Ukraine near the nuclear power station is six times more likely
to show mutations than crops grown in uncontaminated soil, scientists said
Wednesday.

A report in Nature journal by Olga Kovalchuk of the Friedrich Miescher Institute at the Novartis Research
Foundation in Switzerland, and colleagues, compared a wheat crop grown near Chernobyl with a genetically
identical crop 19 miles away.

After one generation the Chernobyl crop showed a rate of mutation six times higher than the crop grown in the
clean soil, the report said.

The scientists said the mutation rate was not in keeping with the levels of radiation.

``We estimate that the wheat plants have been exposed to relatively low doses of chronic irradiation.
Theoretically this low-level exposure should not cause such a large increase in the mutation rate,'' Kovalchuk
and her colleagues said.

They concluded that the high mutation rate indicated that ''chronic exposure to ionizing radiation has effects that
are as yet unknown.''

Further research was needed to analyze the genetic effects of chronic radiation exposure, the scientists added. 

===