Evolutionary footprints of a cold relic in a rapidly warming world.

With accelerating global warming, understanding the evolutionary dynamics of plant adaptation to environmental change is increasingly urgent. Here, we reveal the enigmatic history of the genus (Brassicaceae) a Pleistocene relic that originated from a drought-adapted Mediterranean sister genus during the Miocene. rapidly diversified and adapted to circum-Arctic regions and other cold-characterized habitat types during the Pleistocene.

High rates of evolution preceded shifts to sex-biased gene expression in , the most sexually dimorphic angiosperms.

Differences between males and females are usually more subtle in dioecious plants than animals, but strong sexual dimorphism has evolved convergently in the South African Cape plant genus . Such sexual dimorphism in leaf size is expected largely to be due to differential gene expression between the sexes. We compared patterns of gene expression in leaves among 10 species across the genus.

A neutral model for the loss of recombination on sex chromosomes.

The loss of recombination between sex chromosomes has occurred repeatedly throughout nature, with important implications for their subsequent evolution. Explanations for this remarkable convergence have generally invoked only adaptive processes (e.g.

Introgression is widespread in the radiation of carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plants.

Introgression and hybridization are important processes in plant evolution, but they are difficult to study from a phylogenetic perspective, because they conflict with the bifurcating evolutionary history typically depicted in phylogenetic models. The role of hybridization in plant evolution is best documented in the form of allo-polyploidizations. In contrast, homoploid hybridization and introgression are less explored, although they may be crucial in adaptive radiations.