Light Gluinos and the Parton Structure of the Nucleon

We study the effects of light gluinos with mass below about 1 GeV on the nucleon parton densities and the running of alpha_(S). It is shown that from the available high-statistics DIS data no lower bound on the gluino mass can be derived. Also in the new kinematical region accessible at HERA the influence of such light gluinos on structure f unctions is found to be very small and difficult to detect. For use in more direct searches involving final state signatures we present a radiative estimate of the gluino distribution in the nucleon.