From June 4 to June 12, young employees of the Laboratory of Plant Radiobiology and Ecotoxicology and the PCR laboratory service group (Bitarishvili S.V., Bondarenko V.S., Volkova P.Yu., Kazakova E.A., Makarenko E.S.) conducted field experiments in the exclusion zone of the Chernobyl NPP disaster, as a part of the RFBR grant “Biological effects in populations of wild plants under conditions of chronic radiation exposure”.

The group was accompanied by employees of the Polesye State Radiation-Ecological Reserve from the Department of Ecology of Plant Complexes. The result of fruitful collaboration was the collection of more than a thousand samples of wild plants for biochemical analysis and RNA sequencing, as well as extensive data on the peculiarities of the photosynthesis process typical of plants from the zone of chronic radiation exposure.