Arthur de Lima Silva and colleagues present a hypothesis of floral evolution for the family, illustrating a shift from bisexuality to unisexuality and the evolution of nectaries in a complex monocot family, which can...
How do flowers develop? This is a puzzle tackled by Wei Lai and Louis Ronse de Craene in their paper What is the nature of petals in Caryophyllaceae? Developmental evidence clarifies their evolutionary origin. In it...
Camptotheca is endemic to China and there are limited data about the breeding system and morphogenesis of the flowers. Camptotheca is thought to be related to Nyssa and Davidia in Nyssaceae, which has sometimes been...
The floral development of Berberidopsis beckleri is compared with its sister species B. corallina to clarify the origins of the pentamerous pentacyclic flower of the core eudicots. Both species are unusual amongst core...
Despite the contribution of phenotypic variation in floral morphologies to speciation, species diversity has been recognized by modal morphologies where variation is averaged out. Here Kitazawa and Fujimoto show a...
Petal number is a robust trait in flowering plants. Crucifer flowers have four petals but Monniaux et al. show that petal number varies from zero to four in Cardamine hirsuta. They mapped quantitative trait loci...
Poorly known, mapaniid sedges (Cyperaceae, subfamily Mapanioideae) possess unique floral forms, markedly different from stereotypical monocots, and the evolutionary issues of how or why this has occurred have not been...
Balsaminaceae consist of two genera, the monospecific Hydrocera and its species-rich sister Impatiens; however, morphological support for the current molecular phylogeny of Balsaminaceae is low. Janssens et al...