[busyant]

> Plants on the contrary tolerate much more damage. To the point that we develop new species by bombarding seeds with ionized radiation.

Years ago, I worked with this microbe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans).

"Deinococcus radiodurans is capable of withstanding an acute dose of 5,000 grays (Gy), or 500,000 rad, of ionizing radiation with almost no loss of viability, and an acute dose of 15,000 Gy with 37% viability.[14][15][16] A dose of 5,000 Gy is estimated to introduce several hundred double-strand breaks (DSBs) into the organism's DNA (~0.005 DSB/Gy/Mbp (haploid genome)). For comparison, a chest X-ray or Apollo mission involves about 1 mGy, 5 Gy can kill a human ...."

Some enterprising researchers must have considered engineering this microbe to produce useful products in space, but I don't travel in these circles anymore.

[selcuka]

I like how latin names for such organisms are (intentionally) so fitting: "radiodurans".

[hoseja]

But it's just a side effect of being an extremophile with really good DNA repair machinery. The microbe isn't intentionally resistant to radiation. It's not adapted specifically to radiation environments.

[globnomulous]

The Greek half of the name is equally fitting.