Paramecia cells, like human diploid cells cultured in vitro, provide a useful model system for understanding the mechanism that limits division potential. The reported maxima of the clonal lifespan of Paramecium tetraurelia fall into two ranges: from 220 to 258 fissions and from 310 to 325 fissions. We found that neither the selection of vigorous lines nor the cryptic occurrence of autogamy off...

Flowering plants possess an unrivaled diversity of mechanisms for achieving sexual and asexual reproduction, often simultaneously. The commonest type of asexual reproduction is clonal growth (vegetative propagation) in which parental genotypes (genets) produce vegetative modules (ramets) that are capable of independent growth, reproduction, and often dispersal. Clonal growth leads to an expansi...

Many plant species combine sexual and clonal reproduction. Clonal propagation has ecological costs mainly related to inbreeding depression and pollen discounting; at the same time, species able to reproduce clonally have ecological and evolutionary advantages being able to persist when conditions are not favorable for sexual reproduction. The presence of clonality has profound consequences on t...

Cancer chemotherapy kills some tumour cells, leaving behind resistant clones with less competition for space and resources. These clones, groups of cells that share common ancestry, proliferate without restriction causing disease relapse. Tumours contain a host of cancer clones that are genetically and epigenetically different from one another [1]. These clones follow a Darwinian process of som...

Clonality is common in many aquatic plant species, including seagrasses, where populations are maintained through a combination of asexual and sexual reproduction. One common measure used to describe the clonal structure of populations is clonal richness. Clonal richness is strongly dependent on the biological characteristics of the species, and how these interact with the environment but can a...

The relationship between sexual reproduction and clonal growth in clonal plants often shows up at the ramet level. However, only a few studies focus on the relationship at the genet level, which could finally account for evolution. The sexual reproduction and clonal growth of Ligularia virgaurea, a perennial herb widely distributed in the alpine grasslands of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of Chin...