China is the only country in the world that has consistently used this breeding technology after it first started experiments on crop mutagenesis in space in 1987. Since that year, China has sent crop seeds into Earth orbit dozens of times. In 1990, Chinese scientists announced the first successful space-cultivated crop, a sweet pepper called Yujiao 1. Liu Luxiang said that Yujiao No. 1 has larger fruit and stronger disease resistance than sweet pepper varieties traditionally grown in China.
Sending seeds on short trips into space could help phone database scientists breed new varieties of crops that thrive in climate change to feed the world's growing population. At first glance, the wheat growing on this vast field is no different from the swaying ears of wheat in other fields around the world. In fact, this wheat planted in the vast fields of Northeast China has a lot of origin and is by no means an ordinary crop. It is a brand-new wheat seed cultivated in space. The wheat variety called "Luyuan 502" is the second largest wheat in China. This is a new variety cultivated by sending wheat seeds to orbit 340 kilometers above the Earth's surface. In the unique low gravity of space, and isolated from the magnetic field that protects life on Earth,
the DNA of wheat seeds has undergone subtle changes, resulting in new traits that are more drought tolerant and more resistant to pests and diseases. More and more new varieties of important food crops are cultivated on spacecraft and space stations orbiting the earth, and Luyuan 502 is just one of them. In space in near-Earth orbit, seeds will be affected by microgravity and genetic mutations caused by the bombardment of cosmic rays. This process is called space-induced genetic mutation, or space mutation for short.