ABOVE: David Braun from BraunArborCare climbs the tree in Hood River, Oregon, used in the study.
BOB SCHMITZ
The paper
B.T. Hofmeister et al., “A genome assembly and the somatic genetic and epigenetic mutation rate in a wild long-lived perennial Populus trichocarpa,” Genome Biol, 21:259, 2020.
Like animals, plants can accumulate alterations in their epigenomes—the pattern of epigenetic marks on their DNA. So far, researchers have only examined the epigenomes of short-lived annual plant species. As a result, it has been impossible to tell if those mutations arise throughout development or just during gamete production, as many in the field assumed, explain long-time collaborators Frank Johannes of the Technical University of Munich’s Institute for Advanced Study (TUM-IAS) and the University of Georgia’s Bob Schmitz, who has a fellowship at TUM-IAS.
To understand how DNA methylation changed over time in long-lived species, Johannes, Schmitz, and their colleagues decided to investigate the epigenome of ...
