Nearly forty years ago R. L. Berg proposed that plants with specialized pollination ecology evolve genetic and developmental systems that decouple floral morphology from phenotypic variation in vegetative traits. These species evolve separate floral and vegetative trait clusters, or as she termed them, "correlation pleiades." The predictions of this hypothesis have been generally supported, but...

Theory predicts that tighter correlation between floral traits and weaker relationship between floral and vegetative traits more likely occur in specialized flowers than generalized flowers, favoring by precise fit with pollinators. However, traits and trait correlations frequently vary under different environments. Through detecting spatiotemporal variation in phenotypic traits (floral organ s...

abstract almond is an important nut tree which is cultivated in many mediterranean countries. this study was carried out to study some vegetative and reproductive traits as well as qualitative and quantitative characteristics and their correlation in some self-compatible and self-incompatible genotypes obtained from crossing between touno (male parent) and shahrood 12 (female parent). quantitat...

The ecological niche is a multi-dimensional concept including aspects of resource use, environmental tolerance, and interspecific interactions, and the degree to which niches overlap is central to many ecological questions. Plant phenotypic traits are increasingly used as surrogates of species niches, but we lack an understanding of how key sampling decisions affect our ability to capture pheno...

Drought limits light harvesting, resulting in lower plant growth and reproduction. One trait important for plant drought response is water-use efficiency (WUE). We investigated (1) how the joint genetic architecture of WUE, reproductive characters, and vegetative traits changed across drought and well-watered conditions, (2) whether traits with distinct developmental bases (e.g. leaf gas exchan...

Postembryonic shoot development in maize (Zea mays L.) is divided into a juvenile vegetative phase, an adult vegetative phase, and a reproductive phase that differ in the expression of many morphological traits. A reduction in the endogenous levels of bioactive gibberellins (GAs) conditioned by any one of the dwarf1, dwarf3, dwarf5, or anther ear1 mutations in maize delays the transition from j...

Evolutionary biologists seek to understand the genetic basis for multivariate phenotypic divergence. We constructed an F2 mapping population (N = 539) between two distinct populations of Mimulus guttatus. We measured 20 floral, vegetative, and life-history characters on parents and F1 and F2 hybrids in a common garden experiment. We employed multitrait composite interval mapping to determine th...

Genetic correlations are expected to be high among functionally related traits and lower between groups of traits with distinct functions (e.g., reproductive vs. resource-acquisition traits). Here, we explore the quantitative-genetic and QTL architecture of floral organ sizes, vegetative traits, and life history in a set of Brassica rapa recombinant inbred lines within and across field and gree...

Genetic based knowledge of different vegetative and yield traits play a major role in varietal improvement of rice. Genetic variation gives room for recombinants which are essential for the development of a new variety in any crop. Based on this background, this work was carried out to evaluate genetic diversity of derived mutant lines and establish relationships between their yield and yield c...

Many things change during shoot development. Although the most obvious of these is the production of reproductive structures, the morphology and physiology of leaves and vegetative buds changes as well. Some traits change continuously (either increasing or decreasing), while others are expressed in bimodal (present or absent) or even more complex patterns. Some traits vary in the same way in ev...