Plant responses to environmental heterogeneity depend on life-history traits, which could relate to phenotypical and genetic characteristics. To elucidate this relationship, we examined the variation in population genetics and functional traits of short- and long-lived species that are co-occurring in the steppes of Mongolia. Mongolian steppes represent stressful and water-limited habitats, demanding phenotypic modifications in the short term and/or genetic adaptation in the long term.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Aims: Dogroses (Rosa sect. Caninae) are mostly pentaploid, bearing 2n = 5x = 35 chromosomes in somatic cells. They evolved a unique form of asymmetrical meiosis characterized by two types of chromosomes: (1) chromosomes forming bivalents and distributed in the normal sexual way; and (2) chromosomes occurring as univalents and transferred by a female gamete only.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile European wild roses are abundant and widely distributed, their morphological taxonomy is complicated and ambiguous. In particular, the polyploid Rosa section Caninae (dogroses) is characterised by its unusual meiosis, causing simultaneous clonal and sexual transmission of sub-genomes. This hemisexual reproduction, which often co-occurs with vegetative reproduction, defies the standard definition of species boundaries.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInformation provided by population genetic studies is often necessary to effectively protect endangered species. In general, such data is scarce for aquatic plants and this holds also for , an aquatic macrophyte endemic to northwestern and western Europe. It is threatened across its whole distribution range due to human influences, in particular due to eutrophication and intensive fish farming.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlant genomes consist, to a considerable extent, of non-coding repetitive DNA. Several studies showed that phylogenetic signals can be extracted from such repeatome data by using among-species dissimilarities from the RepeatExplorer2 pipeline as distance measures. Here, we advanced this approach by adjusting the read input for comparative clustering indirectly proportional to genome size and by summarizing all clusters into a main distance matrix subjected to Neighbor Joining algorithms and Principal Coordinate Analyses.
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