Ion beam application in the enhancement of biodiversity

In the last decades the possibility to induce mutations in plants by using ion irradiation (II) has been demonstrated, so enhancing the biodiversity and clarifying the underlying plant physiology. To contribute to these research an automatic set-up was entirely designed and realized at LNS during the last year. Using this set-up various plant seeds and scions were irradiated in 2008 using a 12C beam of energy 62 MeV/A in the frame of experiment IENBIO. Now they are growing to isolate the possible mutagen character. Moreover, the Delayed Luminescence (DL) of some seeds before and after the beam irradiation has been measured in order to probe the possibility to identify the mutated samples inside the irradiated set. Some preliminary results about the work in progress are presented.