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JXB Advance Access originally published online on May 10, 2006
Journal of Experimental Botany 2006 57(9):1847-1855; doi:10.1093/jxb/erj155
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© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press [on behalf of the Society for Experimental Biology]. All rights reserved.
The online version of this article has been published under an Open Access model. Users are entitled to use, reproduce, disseminate, or display the Open Access version of this article for non-commercial purposes provided that: the original authorship is properly and fully attributed; the Journal and the Society for Experimental Biology are attributed as the original place of publication with the correct citation details given; if an article is subsequently reproduced or disseminated not in its entirety but only in part or as a derivative work this must be clearly indicated. For commercial re-use, please contact: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.orgThis paper is available online free of all access charges (see http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/open_access.html for further details)

Opinion Paper

Moving forward in determining the causes of mutations: the features of plants that make them suitable for assessing the impact of environmental factors and cell age

C-A Whittle1,* and MO Johnston2

1Department of Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z4
2Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, 1355 Oxford St., Halifax, NS, Canada B3H 4J1

*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: whittle{at}zoology.ubc.ca

Currently, the types of factors that impact the mutation rate is a controversial issue. The marked attention towards identifying the factors that impact the genomic mutation rate is justified because mutations are the source of genetic variation underlying evolution and because many mutations have deleterious effects and can cause diseases. Although data showing correlations between germ cell division number and mutation rates (from epidemiological studies and molecular evolutionary rate analyses) have suggested that most mutations in animals are replication errors, this notion is highly debated and inconsistencies in the correlations suggest that other, replication-independent factors, could play an important role. Likely candidates include environmental parameters and cell age, but these issues have proved to be difficult to study using animals and in vitro systems, and consequently, very few or no data currently exist. The specific features of plants that make them powerful model systems for revealing the influence of the environment (natural environmental factors) and cell age on the spontaneous genomic mutation rate are discussed here. Overall, the evidence suggests that plants could be key biological systems for advancing our knowledge about how and why heritable mutations arise.

Key words: Cell age, environment, genomic mutation rate, model system, plants


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