The transition from outcrossing to self-fertilization is one of the most common evolutionary
changes in plants, yet only about 10–15% of flowering plants are predominantly selfing. To …

The mechanisms by which flowering plants choose their mating partners have interested
researchers for a long time. Recent findings on the molecular mechanisms of non-self …

Species richness varies widely across the tree of life, and there is great interest in identifying
ecological, geographic, and other factors that affect rates of species proliferation. Recent …

Abstract Background The Solanaceae is a plant family of great economic importance.
Despite a wealth of phylogenetic work on individual clades and a deep knowledge of …

What is the nature of the genetic changes underlying phenotypic evolution? We have
catalogued 1008 alleles described in the literature that cause phenotypic differences among …

Identifying traits that affect rates of speciation and extinction and, hence, explain differences
in species diversity among clades is a major goal of evolutionary biology. Detecting such …

We review and analyze the available literature on the frequency and distribution of self-
incompatibility (SI) among angiosperms and find that SI is reported in more than 100 families …

Background Cyanobacteria are one of the oldest and morphologically most diverse
prokaryotic phyla on our planet. The early development of an oxygen-containing …

Breeding systems are important, and often neglected, aspects of the natural biology of
organisms, affecting homozygosity and thus many aspects of their biology, including levels …

A compound hypothesis positing that self‐fertilization is an evolutionary dead end conflates
two distinct claims: the transition from outcrossing to selfing is unidirectional; and the …