Haze And Sour

Maybe.

With enough depth of coverage you could probably work out how many individual mutations you were looking at. When I was last worried about somoclonal variation (I’m of the camp that doesn’t draw a line between tissue culture induced vs “natural” genomic/phenotypic changes) we didn’t have access to massive sequencing…so I have to admit I haven’t seen data on exactly the kinds/scope/range of mutations or their frequency. I could make the same guesses I would have 20 years ago, re: deletions and expansions at repeats (be they trinucleotide or transposon associated), but I imagine there is actual hard data at this point.

As it turns out you and I (and all the boys and girls) are mosaics, so yeah, when you clone you can go off phene, and the smaller (fewer cells) that clone is, the greater the probability that your clone won’t look like Mom… just because the length of the genome is so long, every copy is different (every copy contains approx one error by by the last estimates I saw).

the bigger issue might be epigenetic changes…either direct DNA modification, or presence/absence/modification of histones…what I often refer to collectively as “decorations” when discussing with non-molecular biologists. turns out we change the decorations as we age… and “redecorating” is associated with reinvigoration when looking at tissue culture based methods.

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