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...
Tag - floral development
botanyone
Taking a close look at the mystery of the disappearing petals
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...
Alun Salt
Floral morphogenesis in Camptotheca
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...
Berberidopsis beckleri, floral development and evolution of the core eudicots
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...
Robustness of floral organ numbers
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...
Stochastic variation in Cardamine hirsuta petal number
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...
Floral ontogeny and gene protein localization in mapaniid sedges
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...
How do you make a flower? Who cares? Hummingbirds.
El Ottra et al. conclude that the degree and diversity of fusions of floral organs in Galipeinae is unique within the order Sapindales.
AJ Cann
Flower development in Balsaminaceae
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...
