| Abstract Detail
The evolutionary importance of polyploidy Scarpino, Samuel V. [1], Levin, Donald A. [2], Meyers, Lauren Ancel [2]. Polyploid Formation Shapes Flowering Plant Diversity. Polyploidy, or whole genome duplication, has been an important feature of eukaryotic evolution. This is especially true in flowering plants, where all extant angiosperms have descended from polyploid species. Here we present a broad comparative analysis of the effect of polyploidy on flowering plant diversity. We examine the widely held hypothesis that polyploid flowering plants generate more diversity than their diploid counterparts, by fitting stochastic birth/ death models to observed ploidal frequency data from 60 extant angiosperm genera. Our results suggest the opposite, that diploids speciate at higher rates than polyploids, through a combination of simple diploid speciation and tetraploidy. Importantly, the estimated diploid advantage stemmed primarily from a higher rate of poly- ploidization in diploids than polyploids. Our model is also able to account for the empirically observed correlation between polyploidy and species richness without assuming that polyploids have a spe- ciation advantage over diploids.
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1 - Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM, 87501, United States
2 - The University of Texas at Austin, Integrative Biology, 1 University Station C0930, Austin, TX, 78712, USA
Keywords:
Polyploidy
angiosperms
ratchet model
diversification rates.
Presentation Type: Symposium Presentation
Session: SY19
Location: Salon 4/The Shaw Conference Centre
Date: Wednesday, July 29th, 2015
Time: 2:15 PM
Number: SY19003
Abstract ID:176
Candidate for Awards:None |
