Developmental Control and Plasticity of Fruit and Seed Dimorphism in Aethionema arabicum.

Understanding how plants cope with changing habitats is a timely and important topic in plant research. Phenotypic plasticity describes the capability of a genotype to produce different phenotypes when exposed to different environmental conditions. In contrast, the constant production of a set of distinct phenotypes by one genotype mediates bet hedging, a strategy that reduces the temporal variance in fitness at the expense of a lowered arithmetic mean fitness.