14 DAY TRIAL // Soybean has recently amazed all international experts, when it has proven that it can live in the radioactive waste-contaminated soils near the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Ukraine. In 1986, reactor number 4 at the plant suffered a meltdown and then exploded, sending plumes of radioactive material all over Eastern Europe, and causing several tens of thousands of deaths from cancer and other related diseases. The fields around the power plant, deserted for well over 20 years, are now home to soybean crops. It does not only grow there, but also produces healthy offspring.
How the seemingly fragile plant withstands the hardships of its environment has gotten experts thinking. They believe that, by understanding this mechanism, they could potentially be led on a path that could result in more drought- and infestation-resistant plants. The find could also have serious implications in the long run, seeing how it's estimated that a large part of the world's population will be left without food over the next few decades. Water will also become increasingly scarce, so only insufficient amounts will be ready for irrigation systems.
“The fact that plants were able to adapt to the area of the world’s largest nuclear accident, is very encouraging. So, we were interested to know how plants can do such a job,” Slovak Academy of Sciences Plant Biotechnology Expert Martin Hajduch said. He is also a co-author of a new scientific study detailing how the plants survive near Chernobyl, recently published in the Journal of Proteome Research.
By using a complex analysis tool known as a mass spectrometer, Slovak researchers analyzed the entire content of soybean seeds harvested from the site of the nuclear accident. They used liquid nitrogen to freeze the seeds, and then they cracked them open and encapsulated the contents inside an electrified block of gel. Spectrometer analyses were then compared with the ones obtained through the exact same method, but from plants located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) away. Results revealed that the plants living in the wasteland had lower levels of the proteins that were usually tasked with shuffling other proteins around, Wired reports.