RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Low Rate of Somatic Mutations in a Long-Lived Oak Tree
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 149203
DO 10.1101/149203
A1 Namrata Sarkar
A1 Emanuel Schmid-Siegert
A1 Christian Iseli
A1 Sandra Calderon
A1 Caroline Gouhier-Darimont
A1 Jacqueline Chrast
A1 Pietro Cattaneo
A1 Frédéric Schütz
A1 Laurent Farinelli
A1 Marco Pagni
A1 Michel Schneider
A1 Jérémie Voumard
A1 Michel Jaboyedoff
A1 Christian Fankhauser
A1 Christian S. Hardtke
A1 Laurent Keller
A1 John R. Pannell
A1 Alexandre Reymond
A1 Marc Robinson-Rechavi
A1 Ioannis Xenarios
A1 Philippe Reymond
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/13/149203.abstract
AB Because plants do not possess a proper germline, deleterious mutations that occur in the soma can be passed to gametes. It has generally been assumed that the large number of somatic cell divisions separating zygote from gamete formation in long-lived plants should lead to many mutations. However, a recent study showed that surprisingly few cell divisions separate apical stem cells from axillary stem cells in annual plants, challenging this view. To test this prediction, we generated and analysed the full genome sequence of two terminal branches of a 234-year-old oak tree and found very few fixed somatic single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), whose sequential appearance in the tree could reliably be traced back along nested sectors of younger branches. Our data indicate that the stem cells of shoot meristems in trees are robustly protected from accumulation of mutations, analogous to the germline in animals.