Effects of ion irradiation on mung bean growth

In the last decades the possibility to induce mutations in plants by using ion irradiation has been demonstrated, so enhancing the biodiversity and clarifying the underlying plant physiology. To add a contribution to these researches, green soya seeds (Mung bean) were irradiated with a 12C beam of energy 62 MeV/A by using the automatic set-up designed and made al LNS to optimize the beam time use. Growth of seeds after irradiation was checked and compared with that of untreated seeds, used as control. Moreover, the Delayed Luminescence (DL) of seeds after irradiation qas measured in order to test the possibility to identify the mutated samples inside the irradiated set. Irreversible damage od seeds appeared for high radiation doses, together with a change in DL parameters