Glaucus
Omono
Any mutagenic agent is also a carcinogen because they are basically synonymous. Plant and animal physiology are not too dissimilar so there will always be a risk.
I imagine all these are well-regulated and ideally only used in a proper lab even by a trained person.
What I would recommend you try instead is use UV light. You can buy many types of UV lamps and it is easy to turn it off and not expose yourself to any light.
Both UV B or UV C light should be good. The question will be which light intensity and duration you will need to apply, likely to young seedlings as they germinate naked.
Also, I think mutation breeding is only interesting to try if you are already sowing several hundreds of seeds anyway.
If you think you can generate corkbark varieties using mutagenic breeding, you'd very likely be disappointed.
If you apply the right dose, you will get mutants. Any mutant. Bad mutants.
And if you get anything interesting, they likely have bad mutations also.
And the something interesting you may get is likely not corkbark.
I just looked at a paper on UV mutagenisis in maize. And they didn't even test if the results they saw were genetic, or a physiological response to the UV radiation. So even if you get something, you will not be sure if it is genetic or a temporary environmental response.
I have been thinking about mutagenic breeding for my azalea seeds. But I am not sure what method I can use easily and effectively.
The article on 'atomic breeding' and using soil with random uranium, that's not really any good because they shoot alpha particles that are quickly stopped by the soil or even the cell wall.
And you don't know how much you have or a knob to increase or decrease.
Ideal would be to use a chemical or gamma rays, imo. But you can't really get a gamma ray source.
With radiation you have to realize you damage 1000 molecules, where 1 molecule is a DNA molecule. And then 1 out of those thousand damaged DNA molecules gets repaired into a mutation. Not sure about these actual numbers, but you can't shooting mutations. You are shooting to destroy chemical bonds. And down the line, some of that results in a mutation.
Additionally, you create mutations in parallel. They are not in the germ line.
I am not in this field of plant breeding at all. But to me it would make most sense to irradiate the pollen. But very often, they don't do it that way. These mutations will be somatic, like a mosiac of mutations in a tissue or organism. So some tissues may become mutant. They have to then grow and become the dominant part of the plant before you notice.
Based on my reading, the ideal chemical is indeed ethyl methanesulphonate. It can be very important which type of mutations the mutagenic agent produces. Point mutations, random, deletions, A to T or A to G or something else. Huge advantage is that you do no damage. You just mess up DNA replication so it generates errors. You can also dose to get specifically this number of mutations, leading to a specific number of loss of function genes. Which you can then tune to make the odds that it hits an essential gene low enough, etc.
I imagine all these are well-regulated and ideally only used in a proper lab even by a trained person.
What I would recommend you try instead is use UV light. You can buy many types of UV lamps and it is easy to turn it off and not expose yourself to any light.
Both UV B or UV C light should be good. The question will be which light intensity and duration you will need to apply, likely to young seedlings as they germinate naked.
Also, I think mutation breeding is only interesting to try if you are already sowing several hundreds of seeds anyway.
If you think you can generate corkbark varieties using mutagenic breeding, you'd very likely be disappointed.
If you apply the right dose, you will get mutants. Any mutant. Bad mutants.
And if you get anything interesting, they likely have bad mutations also.
And the something interesting you may get is likely not corkbark.
I just looked at a paper on UV mutagenisis in maize. And they didn't even test if the results they saw were genetic, or a physiological response to the UV radiation. So even if you get something, you will not be sure if it is genetic or a temporary environmental response.
I have been thinking about mutagenic breeding for my azalea seeds. But I am not sure what method I can use easily and effectively.
The article on 'atomic breeding' and using soil with random uranium, that's not really any good because they shoot alpha particles that are quickly stopped by the soil or even the cell wall.
And you don't know how much you have or a knob to increase or decrease.
Ideal would be to use a chemical or gamma rays, imo. But you can't really get a gamma ray source.
With radiation you have to realize you damage 1000 molecules, where 1 molecule is a DNA molecule. And then 1 out of those thousand damaged DNA molecules gets repaired into a mutation. Not sure about these actual numbers, but you can't shooting mutations. You are shooting to destroy chemical bonds. And down the line, some of that results in a mutation.
Additionally, you create mutations in parallel. They are not in the germ line.
I am not in this field of plant breeding at all. But to me it would make most sense to irradiate the pollen. But very often, they don't do it that way. These mutations will be somatic, like a mosiac of mutations in a tissue or organism. So some tissues may become mutant. They have to then grow and become the dominant part of the plant before you notice.
Based on my reading, the ideal chemical is indeed ethyl methanesulphonate. It can be very important which type of mutations the mutagenic agent produces. Point mutations, random, deletions, A to T or A to G or something else. Huge advantage is that you do no damage. You just mess up DNA replication so it generates errors. You can also dose to get specifically this number of mutations, leading to a specific number of loss of function genes. Which you can then tune to make the odds that it hits an essential gene low enough, etc.
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