Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-11-2020
Department
College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science
Abstract
Somatic mutations can have important effects on the life history, ecology, and evolution of plants, but the rate at which they accumulate is poorly understood and difficult to measure directly. Here, we develop a method to measure somatic mutations in individual plants and use it to estimate the somatic mutation rate in a large, long-lived, phenotypically mosaic Eucalyptus melliodora tree. Despite being 100 times larger than Arabidopsis, this tree has a per-generation mutation rate only ten times greater, which suggests that this species may have evolved mechanisms to reduce the mutation rate per unit of growth. This adds to a growing body of evidence that illuminates the correlated evolutionary shifts in mutation rate and life history in plants.
Publication Title
Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biological sciences
Recommended Citation
Orr, A.,
Padovan, A.,
Kainer, D.,
Kulheim, C.,
Bromham, L.,
Bustos-Segura, C.,
Foley, W.,
Haff, T.,
Hsieh, J.,
Morales-Suarez, A.,
Cartwright, R.,
&
Lanfear, R.
(2020).
A phylogenomic approach reveals a low somatic mutation rate in a long-lived plant..
Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Biological sciences,
287(1922), 20192364.
http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2364
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/1734
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2020 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2019.2364