Rice seeds were carried by recoverable satellite to an
altitude of 218～326 Km. After recov-ery the seeds were sowed
on the earth so as to observe
the character performance of the SP1,SP2 gen-erations and degree of correlation between the
iundividual plants of the SP3 and the average values of the characters of the SP4
generation.
The preliminary results indicated that some changes were ob-served during the mid- late
developing period of the SP1 generation,but the main characters didn’t show significant
difference from the control.The 10 main agronomic and economic characters of the SP2
generation changed with great range and coefficient of variability.Strong broad-spectrum
segre-gation and high variation frequency
appeared; mutation of character variation was
bidirectional.A few characters appeared as deflective distribution and developed in the
direction of multi-directional increase. Some beneficial special mutants were observed among
the individual plants.The individual plants of the SP3 generation were obviously correlated with
the SP4 generation in the average character values of the main economic characters.So it may
be considered that the variation of rice seeds induced by the space conditions is heritable to the
offsprings.Therefore,it can be used as a new method for mutagenic seed breeding.