PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Namrata Sarkar
AU  - Emanuel Schmid-Siegert
AU  - Christian Iseli
AU  - Sandra Calderon
AU  - Caroline Gouhier-Darimont
AU  - Jacqueline Chrast
AU  - Pietro Cattaneo
AU  - Frédéric Schütz
AU  - Laurent Farinelli
AU  - Marco Pagni
AU  - Michel Schneider
AU  - Jérémie Voumard
AU  - Michel Jaboyedoff
AU  - Christian Fankhauser
AU  - Christian S. Hardtke
AU  - Laurent Keller
AU  - John R. Pannell
AU  - Alexandre Reymond
AU  - Marc Robinson-Rechavi
AU  - Ioannis Xenarios
AU  - Philippe Reymond
TI  - Low rate of somatic mutations in a long-lived oak tree
AID  - 10.1101/149203
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 149203
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/24/149203.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/07/24/149203.full
AB  - Because plants do not possess a proper germline, deleterious somatic mutations can be passed to gametes and a large number of cell divisions separating zygote from gamete formation in long-lived plants may lead to many mutations. We sequenced the genome of two terminal branches of a 234-year-old oak tree and found few fixed somatic single-nucleotide variants (SNVs), whose sequential appearance in the tree could be traced along nested sectors of younger branches. Our data suggest that stem cells of shoot meristems are robustly protected from accumulation of mutations in trees.