Polyploid Hybrids can Have an Evolutionary Advantage

By allowing a wider range of insects to pollinate them, hybrids make themselves much less vulnerable to the extinction of a single pollinator.

Looking different from your parents can provide polyploid species with a way to escape evolutionary dead ends, according to new research from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the University of California, Riverside.

The work, //which is outlined in a paper published in the journal Nature Plants, looked at polyploid hybrids in the genus Nicotiana, the group that includes tobacco.

Pheromones - Introduction
Pheromones are the wonder chemicals that are known to significantly influence the love chemistry and sexual attraction between a man and woman.

‘While hybrids might be expected to be a blend of the two parent species, the researchers found that they tended to have shorter and wider flower openings than both of the parent species which means that a wider range of pollinators can enter the flowers.’

Unlike humans, which are diploids - with two copies of each of their 23 chromosomes (one from each parent) - polyploids can have three, four or more copies of each chromosome. This makes them particularly prone to producing hybrids and - in contrast to better-known hybrids such as the mule (the sterile product of a cross between a male donkey and a female horse) - means that crosses between polyploids are often fertile.

By allowing a wider range of insects to pollinate them, hybrids make themselves much less vulnerable to the extinction of a single pollinator.

Elizabeth McCarthy, who carried out the work as part of her Ph.D. at QMUL and is now a post-doctoral researcher at UC Riverside, said:

About Genetic Testing
Genetic testing helps to confirm a genetic condition in an individual and involves q complex laboratory techniques

"Some plants evolve increasingly specialized relationships with the species that pollinate them. A classic example is Darwin's Madagascan orchid, first discovered in 1798. Its exceptionally long nectar spur led Charles Darwin to propose that it was pollinated by a moth whose proboscis - the organ that extracts the nectar - was longer than that of any moth known at the time. Darwin's prediction was spectacularly verified 21 years after his death when just such a moth was discovered."

The problem with this sort of specialized relationship - which we now term coevolution - is that if one of the two species involved becomes extinct, the other is also doomed.

Fahr´s Syndrome - Symptoms, Causes, Diagnosis, Management
Fahr's syndrome is a rare, neurological disorder first described by Karl Theodor Fahr, a German neurologist in 1930.

Source-Eurekalert

Epigenetics
In the recent years ‘epigenetics’ represents inheritable changes in gene expression that do not include DNA alterations.