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NEW DESCRIPTORS. "It is possible to investigate how the occupied areas of morphospace evolved over geologic time, and how selection has acted on the different types of floral organs. Many mathematical and statistical tools are available, routinely used for the study of animal morphospaces, and the time has come to apply them to plants and in particular to flowers." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12969/full View in LinkedIn

COMPARATIVE PLOTS. "Morphospaces allow for studying the unfolding of clade disparity during ontogeny or over geologic timescales (vertical sampling strategies) through comparison of flowers from different developmental stages (constructing developmental morphospaces." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12969/full View in LinkedIn

MORPHOLOGY IN SPACE AND TIME. "The proportion of the morphospace occupied by extant species, the distribution of species and clades in the morphospace, and their variation through evolutionary time can be used to investigate various aspects of organismal evolution and diversity." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12969/full View in LinkedIn

MORPHOSPACES: "mathematical spaces describing and relating the phenotypes of organisms. Because organisms differ in a large number of properties, these mathematical spaces typically are multidimensional." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12969/full View in LinkedIn

EXTINCT TRAITS. "Despite the vast diversity of plants that has arisen through these processes, not all of the possible phenotypic configurations are represented among extant plants. Some traits and trait combinations are vastly represented, while the majority of theoretically possible phenotypes were never accomplished in the course of evolution." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.12969/full View in LinkedIn

ORGANELLE PLOIDY. "In most modern egg/sperm systems, the egg can have millions of organelle genomes, whereas sperm are either stripped of organelles or their organelle DNA is destroyed by the zygote. Therefore, if an “organelle ploidy” system played a role in establishing uniparental in isogamous organisms, this consideration is clearly irrelevant to modern anisogamous organisms." https://lnkd.in/ebVhXPf View in LinkedIn

ORGANELLE INHERITANCE. "This dilemma suggests a hypothesis regarding the origin of the near-universal pattern of organelle inheritance in modern sexual eukaryotes—the uniparental (UP) transmission of organelle genomes to meiotic products." http://cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/6/3/a016154.full View in LinkedIn

QUESTION TO READERSHIP. A number of you have asked me if I would write a series of biologically-themed essays, similar to my posts here. They would be published online. Can you give me feedback if that would be of interest? View in LinkedIn

SELFING DEAD END. "Although selfing may be favored in the short term, due to the transmission advantage of selfing variants and ability of individuals to set seed in pollen-limited conditions, selfing species represent only 10–15% of angiosperms and predominant selfing is often viewed as an evolutionary dead end." https://lnkd.in/dX-FzGD View in LinkedIn

MULTIPLICATION. "The development of a sexual cycle would be expected to place such a control system in jeopardy. The fusion of gametes would generate diploid zygotes with twice the organelle-genome tally, and without some way to return to the “organelle-haploid” value, meiotic products would be “organelle-diploid” and then, in the next round, “organelle-tetraploid” and so on." https://lnkd.in/ebVhXPf View in LinkedIn