H. HESLOT
Laboratoire de Genetique, Institut National Agronomique 16 Rue Clande Bernard, Paris 5e, France
Among several chemicals recently synthesized and tried on barley, ethyl methane sulfonate leads to extremely high mutation frequencies.
The mutation rate being measured by the percentage of spikes segregating for chlorophyll mutants, we found the following results:
 |
Control | : | 0.05% |
| gamma-Rays (25,000 roentgens) | : | 5% | |
| Ethyl methane sulfonate (various treatments) | : | up to 50% |
The details of treatment conditions and results have been published in full elsewhere**.
Part of the offspring of the treated plants has been cultivated this year up to the adult stage and the number of morphological mutants has been found to be also very high.
Although no treatment of wheat has been made by me with ethyl methane sulfonate, I think advisable to inform wheat geneticists of the remarkable activity of this compound.
In unpublished experiments, Dr. Dommergnes has obtained, with this same substance, very high mutation rates on lettuce. This suggests that the mutagenic activity of ethyl methane sulfonate may be a general property, and it is certainly worth while to test it on a series of cultivated plants, including wheat.