Plant Breeding by Using Radiation Mutation

A mutation breeding is to use physical or chemical mutagens to induce mutagenesis, followed by individual selections with favorable traits. The mutation breeding has many advantages over other breeding methods, which include the usefulness for improving one or two inferior characteristics, applications to broad species with different reproductive systems or to diverse plant materials, native or plant introduction with narrow genetic background, time and cost-effectiveness, and valuable mutant resources for genomic researches. Recent applications of the radiation breeding techniques to developments of flowering plants or food crops with improved functional constituents heightened the public's interests in agriculture and in our genetic resources and seed industries. The goals of this project, therefore, include achieving advances in domestic seed industries and agricultural productivities by developing and using new radiation mutants with favored traits, protecting an intellectual property right of domestic seeds or germplasm, and sharing the valuable mutants and mutated gene information for the genomic and biotech researches that eventually leads to economic benefits