Frillylily said:I don't see any way possible that there could be any genetic difference between fans grown off of the same original fan. That just doesn't seem possible.
Mutations can occur every time a cell divides. A daylily begins as one cell. To become a flowering plant requires many cycles of growth, then division into two new daughter cells, followed by growth then division of each daughter cell into two new daughter cells for hundreds or perhaps thousands of divisions. At each division the probability that there will be a mutation is say about one in a million. However there are two copies of each of about 25,000 different genes. The total is about 50,000 genes in each cell. With a mutation rate of one in a million that means every 20 cells will have a new mutation. That means in a daylily plant with millions of different cells there are bound to be many cells with different new mutations. A new fan is created by a new growing point. At some point in time that new growing point was just one cell. If that cell had a mutation then the new fan has a new mutation that the other fans do not have. It happens in other ornamental plants - they are called bud sports.
How many cells an organism has, the mutation rate for that organism and how many cell divisions were required to produce those cells will determine how many genetically different cells that organism will have.
All the cells in our bodies are not necessarily completely genetically identical. The mutation rate for human cells (somatic mutation rate) has been estimated to be about 1 in a million for each cell division. The total number of cells in a human has been estimated to be 3.7 x 10 to the power 13
