Radiation blues
scientists from Switzerland and Ukraine have developed what they call a "biological equivalent of the Geiger counter'. The team has engineered a plant that warns of dangerous levels of radiation. Right now, the only method to detect if plants have been exposed to radiation is to look for cell damage under a microscope. But this is time-consuming and labour-intensive. Further, damaged cells are often very easy to miss. The team, led by Barbara Hohn at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel, Switzerland, has found a simpler way. They added a gene from the bacterium Escherichia coli ( E coli ) to thale cress, another bacterium ( Arabidopsis thaliana ). The E coli gene itself contained a foreign piece of dioxyribosenucleic acid ( dna ) that prevented it from producing a particular enzyme.
If plants were exposed to high-energy radiation, mutations would occur, some of which may