The interrelationships among phenotypic traits of plants has been of interest to plant evolutionary biologists for almost a century. Broadly defined, phenotypic integration refers to the correlations among traits within functional units (such as a flower). In this review, the classic research of Berg (1960) on the relationships among traits within floral modules, the dissociation of the floral ...

Growth and production of agricultural crops are greatly affected by water shortage. Thus, yield enhancement under drought conditions is a major goal of plant breeding. Four commercial tomato cultivars (Imperial, Pakmore VF, Strain-B and Tnshet Star), a drought-tolerant breeding line (L 03306) and their hybrid combinations were selected in this study to evaluate drought tolerance and to develop ...

Plasticity of the phenotypic architecture of wild barley, Hordeum spontaneum, was studied in response to water and nutrient stress. Direct and indirect selection on several vegetative and reproductive traits was estimated and path analysis used to reveal how regulating pathways via maternal investment differed between environments. Vegetative traits displayed differential regulating effect on f...

Plants progress through a temporal sequence of juvenile, adult, and reproductive phases, each marked by the expression of phase-specific traits. Here we show that loss-of-function mutations in ZIPPY (ZIP) cause the premature expression of adult vegetative traits but do not accelerate the onset of reproductive competence or flowering time. ZIP encodes ARGONAUTE7 (AGO7), one of ten members of the...

Diet and helminth fauna were analysed in Gallotia stehlini (Schenkel, 1901), a giant lacertid lizard endemic to Gran Canaria (Canary Islands, Spain) in order to explore eventual relationships between both traits. This species is mainly herbivorous, eating a large proportion of plant matter (occurrence 97.1%) including not only seeds but also leaves and other vegetative parts. Helminth fauna inc...

Plants undergo two major post-embryonic developmental transitions--the juvenile-to-adult vegetative transition (vegetative phase change) and the adult-to-reproductive transition (flowering). In woody plants, these transitions can be separated by years, but in herbaceous species they are often very close together, making it difficult to differentiate the effects of vegetative phase change and fl...

UNLABELLED • PREMISE OF THE STUDY Few studies have examined how epigenetic modifications of DNA may influence individual plant phenotypes and ecological processes in wild plant populations. We investigated natural variation in global DNA cytosine methylation and its phenotypic correlates in the perennial herb Helleborus foetidus.• METHODS We focused specifically on individual differences in...

Raissa L. Berg had a remarkable career in many respects and an impact on the study of phenotypic integration that continues to increase over 50 years after the publication of her seminal paper in that area. She was born and lived most of her life in Russia, with most of her research focused on measuring spontaneous mutation rates in Drosophila. She was forced to abandon this work during the hei...