Linkage between markers and genes that affect a phenotype of interest may be determined by examining differences in marker allele frequency in the extreme progeny of a cross between two inbred lines. This strategy is usually employed when pooling is used to reduce genotyping costs. When the cross progeny are asexual, the extreme progeny may be selected by multiple generations of asexual reprodu...

The architectural complexity of flower structures (hereafter referred to as floral complexity) may be linked to pollination by specialized pollinators that can increase the probability of successful seed set. As plant-pollinator systems become fragile, a loss of such specialized pollinators could presumably result in an increased likelihood of pollination failure. This is an issue likely to be ...

Reproduction is essential to all organisms if they are to contribute to the next generation. There are variousmeans andways of achieving this goal. This review focuses on the role of asexual reproduction for eukaryotic organisms and how its integration in a life cycle can influence their population genetics and evolution. An important question for evolutionary biologists as to why some organism...

The existence of sexual reproduction is difficult to explain because the 2-fold cost of meiosis requires a compensatory 2-fold advantage that is difficult to prove. Here, I show that asexual reproduction has a short-term disadvantage due to the loss of complementation of recessive deleterious mutations, which can overcome the 2-fold cost of meiosis in one or few generations. This complementatio...

This paper represents a brief review on current topics in both asexual and sexual reproduction of Volvox L., a green colonial freshwater alga, which is a valuable model of contemporary developmental biology of plants. In the case of asexual life cycle, the main attention is paid to published data on the mechanisms of differentiation into reproductive and somatic cells of Volvox carteri f. nagar...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Many plants reproduce both clonally and sexually, and the balance between the two modes of reproduction will vary among populations. Clonal reproduction was characterized in three populations of the wild strawberry, Fragaria virginiana, to determine the extent that reproductive mode varied locally between sites. The study sites were fragmented woodlands in Cook County, Illin...

In diploids, sexual reproduction promotes both the segregation of alleles at the same locus and the recombination of alleles at different loci. This article is the first to investigate the possibility that sex might have evolved and been maintained to promote segregation, using a model that incorporates both a general selection regime and modifier alleles that alter an individual's allocation t...

In this paper, we investigate the coevolution of diploid sexual reproduction and cell senescence (i.e., cell aging). We use probability analysis, computer simulation, and exact numerical computation to analyze the impacts of deleterious recessive mutations on sexual and asexual reproduction. The main conclusion is that, without cell senescence, the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction...