Divergent evolutionary trajectories of male and female investment in the Brassicaceae.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Plants have colonised diverse habitats, with their ecological success depending on key adaptive traits. Among these, reproductive characteristics such as pollen and ovule production are critical. The allocation to sexual reproduction is likely shaped by diverse selective pressures and constraints. This study investigates the evolution of pollen and ovule production and its drivers in the Brassicaceae family. METHODS To achieve this, we analysed 158 Brassicaceae species, recorded pollen and ovule numbers, and used phylogenetic analyses to characterise the evolution of these traits. We then cultivated a subset of 66 species in a common garden and tested the association of pollen and ovule production with environmental conditions of original habitats. KEY RESULTS & CONCLUSIONS Our results reveal that ovule production is strongly constrained by phylogeny, whereas pollen production is more evolutionarily flexible. Expectedly, recurrent mating system shifts played a role in this observation, as selfing species consistently produced fewer pollen grains but did not show significant changes in ovule number, supporting selection for reduced male investment in response to increased mating efficiency. In contrast, environmental associations with both traits were limited yet significant, with pollen and ovule production evolving according to different environmental pressures. Polyploidy did not influence the evolution of these traits. These phylogeny-informed findings refine our understanding of the evolutionary drivers of sexual allocation, demonstrating that male and female investment evolve under distinct selective pressures in hermaphroditic species.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Annals of Botany

• Publication date

  2025-08-04

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1093/aob/mcaf176PMID 40754950
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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