MANILA, Philippines ? In 1986, a reactor in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant of Ukraine, then a western state of the Soviet Union, exploded.

In the 20 years since the accident, the affected area, as well as the plants, animals and people living there have been extensively studied by researchers, both to understand the long-term effects of the radiation and how to apply the lessons learned to medicine and ecology.

A 2001 report by the government of Belarus, one of the two countries at the center of the blast, noted that while the plants in the affected area still looked the same, ?plants that are particularly resistant to radioactivity may have become dominant.?

Now a report in the June 5 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research discusses just how the plants have adapted to their newly radioactive surroundings, presenting researchers with a view of the changes involved at the molecular level.

Contaminated

The explosion from Chernobyl plant set at the border of Ukraine and Belarus contaminated the surrounding land within a 30-kilometer radius area roughly equivalent to the distance from Makati City to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport affecting the seven million people who lived there, as well as the plant and animal populations therein.

Some 18,000 square km of farmland was contaminated, less than five percent of which has been unusable ever since. Another 35,000 sq km of forested area was also contaminated. The radiation was also spread by the weather to parts of Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, France and England.

To get an idea of the size of the blast, consider that the radiation from Chernobyl reactor explosion 23 years ago released 100 times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped over both Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War.

Comparison

Maksym Danchenko from the Slovak Academy of Sciences and his colleagues from a number of Slovakian institutions looked at how soybean plants grown in the contaminated fields near Chernobyl had to change in order to survive what they called ?the worst nuclear environmental disaster ever seen.?

They compared seeds collected from soybean plants grown in two different fields from the same region. One field was radioactively contaminated while the other was not.

The soybean seeds from the unexposed field were rounder, larger and paler in color than the seeds from the contaminated field. Danchenko and his colleagues also found that the seeds exposed to radiation took water from the ground at a slower rate than the unexposed seeds.

And when the researchers measured the radioactivity of the seeds, they found that the soybean plants from the radioactive field had adapted to their environment by developing a way to prevent the radiation from seeping from the soil to the plants and then into the seeds. They found that the plants from irradiated seeds produced more proteins that protect plant cells from potential damage caused by heavy metals and radiation.

Protective feature

In particular, Danchenko and his colleagues found that the soybean plants from the contaminated field produced a third more of a protein that has been shown to protect human blood from radiation damage compared to the plants grown in the uncontaminated field. The finding leads the researchers to think that the same protein conveys a similar protective feature onto the soybean seeds.

Danchenko and his colleagues noted in their article that not all plants affected by the Chernobyl explosion have made the same adaptations as the soybean plant. Still their findings offer other researchers a plant model that can serve as a starting point for other similar studies on cultivating radioactive plots of land.

E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.