*Understanding disease distributions is of fundamental and applied importance, yet few studies benefit from integrating broad sampling with ecological and phylogenetic data. Here, anther-smut disease, caused by the fungus Microbotryum, was assessed using herbarium specimens of Silene and allied genera of the Caryophyllaceae. *A total of 42,000 herbarium specimens were examined, and plant geogra...

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Understanding mechanisms of coevolution between nuclear and mitochondrial (mt) genomes is a defining challenge in eukaryotic genetics. The angiosperm genus Silene is a natural system to investigate the causes and consequences of mt mutation rate variation because closely related species have highly divergent rates. In Silene species with fast-evolving mtDNA, nuclear genes that encode mitochondr...

• Sex ratio polymorphism has been extensively studied in Silene latifolia, but it is neither known whether inbreeding (which is likely to occur under field conditions) affects it nor which of the proposed mechanisms (Y degeneration, X-linked drive) is more important. Both mechanisms predict reduced pollen performance. • In this study, females were crossed with pollen from related and unrelated ...

Here we introduce a new model species, Silene colpophylla, that could facilitate research of sex chromosome evolution and sex-determining systems. This species is related to the well-established dioecious plant model Silene latifolia. Our results show that S. colpophylla is, similarly to S. latifolia, a male heterogametic species, but its sex chromosomes have evolved from a different pair of au...

Nuclear DNA content variation over orders of magnitude across species has been attributed to 'junk' repetitive DNA with limited adaptive significance. By contrast, our previous work on Silene latifolia showed that DNA content is negatively correlated with flower size, a character of clear adaptive relevance. The present paper explores this relationship in a broader phylogenetic context to inves...

Silene dioica is a dioecious plant of the family Caryophyllaceae. In the present study, we used Illumina sequencing technology (MiSeq) to sequence, de novo assembly and annotate the transcriptomes of male and female copper tolerant S. dioica individuals. We sequenced the normalized mRNA of roots, shoots, flower buds and flowers for each sex. Raw reads of the transcriptome assembly project for S...