The somatic embryos talked about in the article I posted was referring to forced embryos created from somatic cells and cultured in specific media. I posted the link for the sentence that states “This indicates that genetic variation occurs naturally in nucellar seedlings”. To put it into context, that specific article was referring to isozyme banding patterns.
When I talked about environmental stressors causing a cascade, I was referring to epigenetics but the new epigenitics where traits can be heritable and not the old thought that it was not heritable. The noise in the genome was once thought to have no use but now researchers are finding out otherwise.
I’m sorry I can’t go into specifics, I can only repeat what is already published because of non disclosure agreements I signed when I was performing research. This video explains it in simple terms although epigenetics is anything but simple.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_aAhcNjmvhcPlanting polyembryonic seeds, you can get clones that are identical to the parents but you can also get seedlings that are a bit different. Things are much more complicated than what I can easily put into words but there are published articles out there that talk about things such as pollinating parent of a polyembryonic Mango having an affect on the number of nucellar seedlings.
Also, selecting the nucellar seedling/seedlings is not as simple as saying get rid of the offtype or that the clone is always the more dominant seedling. It is variety specific and one article I read stated that the zygotic seedling was the dominant seedling in up to 20% of the lot.
Most of this information is more than the average hobbyists backyard Mango grower wants or needs to know and that is why I suggested that when looking for a clone, simply keep all, or at least two seedlings from a polyembryonic seed and wait for all seedlings to mature and Fruit in order to tell which is the clone. One must be savvy and ensure that if only keeping two seedlings, the two seedlings are arising from different segments of seed.
I have often seen multiple sprouts coming from Monoembryonic seeds but they share the same origin and are not polyembryonic.
Simon