A study on wheat grown close to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has found a DNA mutation rate three times higher than expected. "This was a very big surprise," says Yuri Dubrova of Leicester University, UK.
"Our results point to as yet unknown effects of low-dose chronic exposure to ionising radiation, which make it substantially more mutagenic than previously thought," he says.
John Thacker of the MRC's Radiation and Genome Stability Unit in Harwell, Oxfordshire, UK says: "The results sound very interesting. There appear to be some sites in the genome that are highly sensitive to radiation - and we don't really understand why."
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