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In botany, a sport or bud sport, traditionally called lusus, is a part of a plant that shows morphological differences from the rest of the plant. Sports may differ by foliage shape or color, flowers, fruit, or branch structure. The cause is generally thought to be chance in a single cell. Sports may also arise from stable changes in gene expression due to Epigenetics modifications, including histone modification, DNA methylation, chromatin remodeling and RNA silencing.DOI 10.1038/s41438-018-0062-x If the clonal descendants of a modified cell eventually form a meristem that gives rise to new plant parts, those may be of a new phenotype. Often only part of the meristem cells are affected, resulting in genetic chimerism in such sports.
The use of spontaneous mutations in plant breeding may avoid certain challenges associated with breeding by sexual recombination, like heterozygosity and sexual incompatibilities. Since usually only (very) few alleles are affected, most of the traits of the original cultivar are retained.DOI 10.1016/j.scienta.2022.110979
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