This award will support a seminar, "Evolutionary Studies on Plant Breeding Systems," organized jointly by Prof. Douglas Soltis of Washington State University and Prof. Kunio Iwatsuki of the University of Tokyo, Japan. Participants will meet in Tokyo July 18-20, 1989, to discuss the evolution of plant mating systems and various aspects of sexual reproduction in plants. Progress in this field has been particularly rapid in recent years, largely due to the development of new enzyme and DNA technologies which facilitate analyses of plant mating systems and their evolution. This research field has traditionally been of interest to geneticists, evolutionary biologists, systematists, ecologists and plant population biologists, and this seminar will bring together researchers from all of these fields. They will discuss the evolution of sexual and asexual reproduction; polyploidy and its influence on sexual expression and the evolution of breeding systems; evolution of inbreeding and outbreeding of plants; and sex allocation theory and evolution of sexual systems in plants. The seminar may be expected to indicate directions for the rapid progress in research in this area that will be made possible by intelligent application of new genetic-engineering technologies.
