simSOMA: a cell-lineage based simulator of the somatic VAF spectrum in plants

Abstract

Plants accumulate somatic mutations during growth, and some of these mutations can spread from local cell lineages into branches, organs, or reproductive tissues. There is growing interest in these variants because they can under-lie bud-sport traits in crops, contribute to within-organism somatic selection, and provide genetic variation that may be transmitted vegetatively or sexually to future generations. Recent genomic sequencing of bulk and layer-enriched plant tissues has shown that de novo somatic variants can generate complex variant allele-frequency (VAF) spectra. Interpreting these spectra requires understanding how mutations arising during mitotic cell division are filtered or amplified through shoot growth, branching, and organ formation. Because these processes interact across multiple scales, their combined effects are difficult to derive analytically. Here, we present simSOMA, a modular simulator that links rooted plant topologies to explicit cell-lineage dynamics. simSOMA models somatic mutation accumulation during stem-cell self-renewal in the shoot apical meristem, clonal expansion from the stem-cell niche to the meristem periphery, branch founding, and organ formation. Applying simSOMA across diverse growth scenarios revealed how individual processes can be isolated, varied, and combined to assess their effects on organ-level VAF spectra and among-organ variant sharing. The same simulated spectra can also be transformed to represent bulk or layer-enriched sampling and phased or unphased variant readouts, separating effects of developmental history from those introduced by tissue composition and allele counting. Because simSOMA is organized around modules with defined input-output interfaces, individual developmental components can be replaced or extended as new empirical information becomes available. This makes simSOMA a flexible tool for testing alternative models of somatic mosaicism in plants and for guiding the design and interpretation of VAF-based sequencing studies. The simulator is available at https://github.com/jlab-code/simSOMA.