A common event for flowering plants is whole genome duplication (WGD), where a plant gets extra chromosomes. It’s often studied in mature plants, but there can also be extra copies of the genome in the pollen, and...
Some plants have pairs of chromosomes, they’re diploid organisms like us. Other plants have more than two copies of chromosomes, they’re polyploid. Strawberries can even be octoploid. Mosses can be polyploid too, but a...
Plant genome size (GS) varies widely – by as much as a factor of 2500 in land plants alone. Outside of genome duplication (polyploidy), repetitive DNA is thought to be the main contributor to this variation. However...
The widely distributed Cystopteris fragilis brittle bladder-fern, complex is a challenging system for studying polyploid evolution, cytotype diversity, distribution and ecology. Hanušová et al. screen cytotypes over the...
Recent work on the green alga Haematococcus lacustris uncovered the largest plastid genome on record: a whopping 1.35 Mb (with >90% non-coding DNA). In a recent review published in AoBP, David R. Smith takes a closer...
The shoot apical meristem (SAM) is the key organizing element of the plant body. Surprisingly, there are almost no across-species comparative data showing links between the SAM and whole-plant traits such as leaf size...
The genus Aesculus (horse chestnut, buckeye) consists of 12 to 19 extant species native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. Aesculus is notable amongst woody angiosperms for its unusually large seeds. While chromosome...