Category: Uncategorized

SPECIATION. "Polyploidy has long been proposed as a mechanism of “instant speciation”, but empirical analyses of this contention are relatively rare." https://lnkd.in/e5Q_ate View in LinkedIn

TRANSITION STATE. "Polyploidy has long been hypothesized to be associated with transitions in sexual systems in flowering plants, and alternatively hypothesized to be associated with both monoecy and dioecy." https://lnkd.in/e5Q_ate View in LinkedIn

EXAPTATION. "Recent analyses have demonstrated that neofunctionalization of paralogs from ancient polyploidy have driven a chemical arms race between plants of the Brassicales and their pierid butterfly herbivores." https://lnkd.in/e5Q_ate View in LinkedIn

GENE DUPLICATION. "He proposed the now familiar concept that these polyploid plants were fertile because genome doubling restored chromosome pairing in otherwise sterile hybrids. The restoration of fertility to sterile hybrids by doubling their genomes was a potent and elegant demonstration of how postzygotic reproductive isolation could be solved." https://lnkd.in/e5Q_ate View in LinkedIn

PLANT POLYPLOIDY. "There is consensus that polyploidy has contributed to the evolution of nearly all lineages of vascular plants." https://lnkd.in/e5Q_ate View in LinkedIn

TRIUMPH OF DUPLICATION. "Speciation by genome duplication was recognized early in the study of evolutionary genetics and “represented the first major triumph in the genetics of speciation”. http://scholar.google.com/ View in LinkedIn

PARSING OLD GENES. "One of the primary goals of our work on gene duplication is to explain the shortcomings of the classical model, which postulates that the usual fate of a duplicated gene is either conversion to a nonfunctional pseudogene or acquisition of a new function. We believe that duplicate genes are frequently preserved through a partitioning of functions of ancestral genes (subfunctionalization), rather than by the evolution of new functions." https://lnkd.in/e8G48jD View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXITY AND POPULATION SIZE. "Using population-genetic principles as a guide to understanding the evolution of duplicate genes, introns, mobile-genetic elements, and regulatory-region complexity, our work is advancing the hypothesis that much of eukaryotic genome complexity initially evolved as a passive indirect response to reduced population size (relative to the situation in prokaryotes)." https://lnkd.in/e8G48jD View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend exploring Darwin's "abominable mystery", the rise of flowering plants (angiosperms). There was no way Darwin could have known the full story: genes had not been discovered then. Their extraordinary diversity of their sexual organs (flowers), seed design, and the genetics driving them is fascinating. I touch on a bigger topic, whole genome duplication, that will be taken up in more detail in coming weeks. View in LinkedIn

QUESTION 3. "Does polyploidy lead to greater evolvability in species interactions?" https://lnkd.in/bCmw3Fr View in LinkedIn