Life Sciences Commons^™

Anatomical Analysis Of Somatic Mutation Accumulation In Mimulus Guttatus, Amanda Burrell

University Honors Theses

Plants are seemingly immortal in their abilities to survive long periods of dormancy in different life stages, live for thousands of years, and even grow into whole forests from one clone, all through a series of mitotic and meiotic events, but how many mutations do plants acquire in their lifetime? And just how many of these mutations are heritable? To answer these questions, first we must answer: how many cell divisions are there in the length of a stem? The purpose of this study is to answer just that by establishing a protocol for estimating the number of germ cell …