This research is poised to captivate not only scholars focused on plant evolution and development, but also scientists broadly interested in mutation mechanisms in multicellular organisms.īiodiversity ultimately results from mutations that provide genetic variation for organisms to adapt to their environments. The authors provide compelling evidence, leveraging rigorous sequencing analysis and innovative bioinformatic techniques, to demonstrate that many plant somatic mutations are accumulated in a replication-independent manner. This study is an important contribution to our understanding of somatic mutation mechanisms in plants, uncovering a surprising constancy in the yearly accumulation of somatic mutations regardless of the species' growth rates. Our findings suggest that older trees make a greater contribution towards generating genetic variation. Although the majority of somatic mutations were restricted to a single branch, we also identified mutations present in multiple branches, likely transmitted during growth. Through a comparative analysis of somatic mutation landscapes in slow- and fast-growing species, we observed a clock-like accumulation of somatic mutations in both species, regardless of their growth rates. The significance of our study lies in the discovery of an absolute time-dependent accumulation of somatic mutations in long-lived tropical trees, independent of growth rate. These findings suggest that somatic mutations accumulate with absolute time and older trees have a greater contribution towards generating genetic variation. We also found that somatic mutations are neutral within an individual, but those mutations transmitted to the next generation are subject to purifying selection. leprosula, resulting in a constant somatic mutation rate per year between the two species. This difference in the somatic mutation rate was scaled with the slower growth rate of S. However, we found that the rate of somatic mutation accumulation per meter of growth was 3.7-fold higher in S. In both species, we observed a linear increase in the number of somatic mutations with physical distance between branches. Using newly- constructed genomes, we identified a greater number of somatic mutations in tropical trees than in temperate trees. leprosula (fast-growing), in central Borneo, Indonesia. Here, we examined the somatic mutation landscapes of two tropical trees, Shorea laevis (slow- growing) and S. However, mutational processes in natural environments and their relationship with growth rates are largely unknown, particular in tropical ecosystems with high biodiversity. The rates of appearance of new mutations play a central role in evolution.
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