Mutation Induction, Detection and Breeding to Resist Viral and Fungal Diseases and Thermal Extremism for Vegetables

To artificially induce hereditary changes in plants, either physical or chemical agents are used. Ionizing radiation is a widely used physical agent to treat the seeds and other crops plant material to create heritable mutations. On other means, one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of genetics was the discovery that mutations can be induced by physical and chemical mutagens (agents that change the genetic base of an organism). Mutation induction, together with mutation detection a key element of mutation breeding, has been an important tool for plant breeders for more than 70 years to increase the genetic diversity of plants and derive new mutant lines with improved characteristics.