Background

Plant mutation breeding accelerates crop improvement through the generation of novel genetic diversity that facilitates selection from a large germplasm pool. Accelerated crop improvement is a must for food security. It is also important for stabilizing crop performance under pressures of a changing climate, viz., warming temperatures, frequently occurring droughts, rapid salinization of soils, and the transboundary spread of pests and diseases. Beyond routine crop improvement, the combination of induced mutations and current genomic/bioinformatic tools enable the establishment of genetic associations that facilitate both marker-assisted breeding and gene editing.

The Joint FAO/IAEA Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture maintains the Mutant Variety Database (MVD) as a repository of voluntarily contributed information of officially released mutant crop varieties of both seed and vegetative crops. The database with its records of improved mutant varieties released across the world and across more than a hundred different crop species demonstrates the contribution of mutation breeding to global food security and to crop adaptation to climate change.  Information on each variety in the database includes the type of mutagen and dose used, the traits improved, and available agronomic data of the variety released.

In the context of the MVD, a mutant variety is a new plant variety that has been bred through:

1. Direct use of physical or chemical mutagenesis, somaclonal variation or activation of endogenous transposable elements
2. Indirect use of a mutant line/lines, which is/are used as parental variety/varieties in cross breeding (cross between mutant lines or with a released variety/varieties)

You can also search mutant varieties of interest by general or advanced search, see Search.

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