Sex determination in dioecious Mercurialis annua and its close diploid and polyploid relatives.

ABSTRACT: Separate sexes have evolved on numerous independent occasions from hermaphroditic ancestors in flowering plants. The mechanisms of sex determination is known for only a handful of such species, but, in those that have been investigated, it usually involves alleles segregating at a single locus, sometimes on heteromorphic sex chromosomes. In the genus Mercurialis, transitions between combined (hermaphroditism) and separate sexes (dioecy or androdioecy, where males co-occur with hermaphrodites rather than females) have occurred more than once in association with hybridisation and shifts in ploidy. Previous work has pointed to an unusual 3-locus system of sex determination in dioecious populations. Here, we use crosses and genotyping for a sex-linked marker to reject this model: sex in diploi

SUBMITTER: Russell JR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4815579 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature