This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Two important aims of comparative biology are to identify characteristics that affect the rates at which new species form or become extinct, and those that evolve more frequently in one direction than another. This project investigates whether self-incompatibility, the ability of some plants to selectively prevent fertilization by their own pollen, affects the probability of formation or extinction of species. It combines greenhouse and field studies with mathematical modeling to investigate (a) the genetics underlying the complex mechanism of self-incompatibility in the agriculturally important plant family Solanaceae, (b) the conditions under which this mechanism is likely to be beneficial or detrimental within species, and (c) develop methods to investigate the effects of self-incompatibility on rates of formation and extinction of species from the study of groups that are incompletely sampled, a common problem in biology.
The plant family studied contains potato, tomato, eggplant, tobacco, and many other cultivated and wild species selected to lose self- incompatibility. Understanding the basis of evolutionary success or failure of self-fertilizing plants will have implications for the development of seed banks, conservation priorities, and invasive species management. Finally, the mathematical methods developed will be applicable to studies of a wide variety of other traits and organisms.
