Date of Award:

5-1965

Document Type:

Thesis

Degree Name:

Master of Science (MS)

Department:

Plants, Soils, and Climate

Department name when degree awarded

Botany

Committee Chair(s)

W. S. Boyle

Committee

W. S. Boyle

Abstract

The complex response of plants to ionizing radiation has never been clearly understood. One of the main problems is the differential sensitivity of plants to radiation. A clear understanding of differential sensitivity lies far in the future. For the present a major question is: can we predict the radiosensitivity of a plant before radiation exposure? Some progress has been made in answering this question. Sparrow et al. (29) feel that they have a useful statistic which can be used to predict the approximate radiosensitivity of a plant. Average interphase chromosome volume has been tested on sixteen species of herbaceous plants (29) and twelve species of woody spermatophytes (30). In all cases, this value has proved to be a useful statistic for predicting radiosensitivity. The present investigation extends the study to see if average interphase chromosome volume can be used as a valid index of the approximate radiosensitivity of native forage grasses.

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Botany Commons

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