Many plants are perennials, but studies of self-fertilization do not usually include features of perennial life histories. We therefore develop models that include selfing, a simple form of perenniality, adult inbreeding depression, and an adult survivorship cost to seed production. Our analysis shows that inbreeding depression in adults diminishes the genetic transmission advantage associated ...

Flavonoids are thought to function in the plant stress response and male fertility in some, but not all, species. We examined the effects of a self-fertile chalcone synthase null allele, a, for the effects of heat and light stress on fertilization success and flower production in Ipomoea purpurea. Pollen recipients and pollen donors of both homozygous genotypes exhibit reduced fertilization suc...

We analyze two models of the maintenance of quantitative genetic variance in a mixed-mating system of self-fertilization and outcrossing. In both models purely additive genetic variance is maintained by mutation and recombination under stabilizing selection on the phenotype of one or more quantitative characters. The Gaussian allele model (GAM) involves a finite number of unlinked loci in an in...

The loss of morphological and physiological mechanisms that prevent self-fertilization is perhaps the most common evolutionary trend in the flowering plants. It is generally acknowledged that self-fertilization may often be favored by selection at the individual level, principally by providing reproductive assurance when conditions for vector-mediated pollination are poor and also because matin...

Inbreeding in hermaphroditic plants can occur through two different mechanisms: biparental inbreeding, when a plant mates with a related individual, or self-fertilization, when a plant mates with itself. To avoid inbreeding, many hermaphroditic plants have evolved self-incompatibility (SI) systems which prevent or limit self-fertilization. One particular SI system-homomorphic SI-can also reduce...

This study investigated the copulatory behaviour of the lumbricid earthworm Eisenia fetida (Savigny, 1826) in a natural population, and the uniparental reproduction of E. fetida and E. andrei Bouché 1972, two closely-related species. Sperm transfer occurred in 61 % of the matings observed, of which 88.2 % showed bi-directional sperm transfer, 9.8 % unidirectional sperm transfer and one earthwor...

The evolutionary transition from outcrossing to self-fertilization (selfing) through the loss of self-incompatibility (SI) is one of the most prevalent events in flowering plants, and its genetic basis has been a major focus in evolutionary biology. In the Brassicaceae, the SI system consists of male and female specificity genes at the S-locus and of genes involved in the female downstream sign...