Sunflower oil with increased levels of saturated fatty acids has important applications in food industry. The objective of this research was to develop novel variations with increased saturated fatty acid levels by chemical muta genesis. Seeds of four different accessions of Peredovik were treated with a solution of ethylmethane sulfonate. M2 seeds from a single M1 plant exhibited a large variation (5-29%) for palmitic acid content. The progenies of all selected M2 seeds showed again continuous ranges of variation (10-30%) for palmitic acid content. Similar continuous segregation was observed in some M3:4 and M4:5 families derived from high palmitic half seeds (>25%), although other families had uniformly high palmitic acid content. Previous genetic studies of CAS-5, a high palmitic acid mutant which showed clear bimodal distributions in the M2 generation, concluded that the trait was genetically controlled by alle les at three loci. The different segregation patterns observed in NP-40, the new high palmitic acid mutant, suggested that it was genetically different from CAS-5.