Competition and drought affect cleistogamy in a non-additive way in the annual ruderal .

Competition affects mixed-mating strategies by limiting available abiotic or biotic resources such as nutrients, water, space, or pollinators. Cleistogamous species produce closed (cleistogamous, CL), obligately selfed, simultaneously with open (chasmogamous, CH), potentially outcrossed flowers. The effects of intraspecific competition on fitness and cleistogamy variation can range from limiting the production of costly CH flowers because of resource limitation, to favouring CH production because of fitness advantages of outcrossed, CH offspring.

Season-dependent effect of cleistogamy in Lamium amplexicaule: flower type origin versus inbreeding status.

Premise: Inbreeding depression is traditionally considered a major factor favoring outcrossing in hermaphrodites. Recent experiments have shown that environmental conditions can influence the magnitude of inbreeding depression, but their relevance in natural populations is unclear. To investigate this, we studied the cleistogamous species Lamium amplexicaule, an annual species with individuals experiencing either spring or autumn environmental conditions.

Evolutionary potential of a widespread clonal grass under changing climate.

Adaptive responses are probably the most effective long-term responses of populations to climate change, but they require sufficient evolutionary potential upon which selection can act. This requires high genetic variance for the traits under selection and low antagonizing genetic covariances between the different traits. Evolutionary potential estimates are still scarce for long-lived, clonal plants, although these species are predicted to dominate the landscape with climate change.

Adaptive differentiation of Festuca rubra along a climate gradient revealed by molecular markers and quantitative traits.

Species response to climate change is influenced by predictable (selective) and unpredictable (random) evolutionary processes. To understand how climate change will affect present-day species, it is necessary to assess their adaptive potential and distinguish it from the effects of random processes. This will allow predicting how different genotypes will respond to forecasted environmental change.

Isolation and characterization of microsatellite markers for the cleistogamous species Lamium amplexicaule (Lamiaceae).

Premise Of The Study: Lamium amplexicaule is a cleistogamous plant that produces both closed flowers (obligately self-pollinated) and open flowers (potentially outcrossed). The conditions for the maintenance of such a mating system depend on the outcrossing rate of the open flowers, which can be estimated using neutral microsatellite markers. •

Methods And Results: Forty primer pairs corresponding to microsatellite motifs obtained by coupling multiplex microsatellite enrichment and next-generation sequencing were tested.