April 26, 2024, marked the 38th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In the contaminated zone (Novozybkovsky District, Bryansk Region), field experiments were initiated to study the accumulation of radiocaesium in the grain of 42 varieties of winter rye and 92 varieties of winter wheat. From 1987 to 1993, a total of 1,532 varieties from 28 crops of the global gene pool were examined. The research was conducted by the Moscow branch of VIR, in collaboration with several other research institutions. The findings of these experiments revealed that the global plant gene pool exhibits substantial diversity in radionuclide accumulation. The maximum variation in cesium-137 accumulation in grain under the same year and field conditions can be as much as 170-fold between different crops and up to ninefold among varieties within a single crop. The enological approaches described by I.M. Molchan, which consider informational and energetic interactions at various biological levels, should be integrated into both breeding programs and the assessment of the global plant gene pool.
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