The development of strategies to improve crop plants by the production of hybrid varieties is a major goal in plant breeding. Hybrid progeny often have a higher yield, increased resistance to disease, and an enhanced performance in different environment compared with the parental lines. Availability of cost effective mechanism/ method to produce large scale hybrid seed utilizing selected parent...

Hybrid sterility in the heterogametic sex is a common feature of speciation in animals. In house mice, the contribution of the Mus musculus musculus X chromosome to hybrid male sterility is large. It is not known, however, whether F1 male sterility is caused by X-Y or X-autosome incompatibilities or a combination of both. We investigated the contribution of the M. musculus domesticus Y chromoso...

Capturing the process of speciation early enough to determine the initial genetic causes of reproductive isolation remains a major challenge in evolutionary biology. We have found, to our knowledge, the first example of substantial intraspecific polymorphism for genetic factors contributing to hybrid male sterility. Specifically, we show that the occurrence of hybrid male sterility in crosses b...