TY - JOUR T1 - A phylogenomic approach reveals a low somatic mutation rate in a long-lived plant JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/727982 SP - 727982 AU - Adam J. Orr AU - Amanda Padovan AU - David Kainer AU - Carsten Külheim AU - Lindell Bromham AU - Carlos Bustos-Segura AU - William Foley AU - Tonya Haff AU - Ji-Fan Hsieh AU - Alejandro Morales-Suarez AU - Reed A. Cartwright AU - Robert Lanfear Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/07/727982.abstract N2 - 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 has been very difficult to measure directly. Here, we demonstrate a novel method to measure somatic mutations in individual plants and use this approach 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. ER -