Somatic deleterious mutation rate in a woody plant: estimation from phenotypic data

We conducted controlled crosses in populations of the long-lived clonal shrub, Vaccinium angustifolium (lowbush blueberry) to estimate inbreeding depression and mutation parameters associated with somatic deleterious mutation. Inbreeding depression level was high, with many plants failing to set fruit after self-pollination. We also compared fruit set from autogamous pollinations (pollen collected from within the same inflorescence) to fruit set from geitonogamous pollinations (pollen collected from the same plant but from inflorescences separated by several meters of branch growth). The difference between geitonogamous versus autogamous fitness within single plants is referred to as \"autogamy depression\" (AD). AD can be caused by somatic deleterious mutation. AD was significantly different from zero for fruit set. We developed a maximum likelihood procedure to estimate somatic mutation parameters from AD, and applied it to geitonogamous and autogamous fruit set data from this experimen...