Abstract Endemic (range restricted or precinctive) plant species are frequently observed to exhibit polyploidy (chromosome set duplication), which can drive shifts in ecology for angiosperms, but whether endemism is generally associated with throughout the flowering plants has not been determined. We tested hypothesis that more frequent and pronounced (higher evident ploidy levels) recently evo...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS The ultrastructure of the pollen tubes and the unusual multicellular stigmatic hairs of Trithuria, the sole genus of Hydatellaceae, are described in the context of comparative studies of stigmatic and transmitting tissue in other early-divergent angiosperms. METHODS Scanning and transmission electron microscopy and immunocytochemistry are used to study the structure and co...

We summarize our recent studies showing that angiosperm mitochondrial (mt) genomes have experienced remarkably high rates of gene loss and concomitant transfer to the nucleus and of intron acquisition by horizontal transfer. Moreover, we find substantial lineage-specific variation in rates of these structural mutations and also point mutations. These findings mostly arise from a Southern blot s...

Often during flowering plant evolution, ribosomal protein genes have been lost from the mitochondrion and transferred to the nucleus. Here, we show that substitution by a duplicated, divergent gene originally encoding the chloroplast or cytosolic ribosomal protein counterpart accounts for two missing mitochondrial genes in diverse angiosperms. The rps13 gene is missing from the mitochondrial ge...