Parental conflict in plants: Maternal excess in Silene seeds
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | Silene latifolia, a dioecious plant with evolutionary young sex chromosomes (2n = 24, XX in females and XY in males), became an excellent model species that has been studied for more than a century since the Charles Darwin era. As a model plant, S. latifolia allowed researchers to study evolutionary processes of sex chromosome degeneration, transposable element sex-specific proliferation, and dosage compensation. Despite, S. latifolia is a well-established model in the field of sex chromosome biology, the interparental conflict over how maternal resources are distributed among offspring is unknown. The theory of interparental conflict suggests that mothers use their resources to support the development of their offspring with multiple fathers while the parents of individual embryos have different interest. The latter relates to nutrient investment, assuming that the father of an individual embryo is unrelated to other fathers. Thus, the effect of paternal control over seed development is to produce more assertive offspring. In contrast, greater maternal control restricts excessive resource investment into any further individual, strategically sharing resources among all offspring. In this work, we tested the effect of interparental conflict in a set of polyploid plants that allowed us to assess the maternal control of resource allocation. Because S. latifolia belongs to Caryophyllaceae family, where parental conflict is expected to be limited due to the resource allocation in the perisperm, we test whether polyploidy increase the endosperm control of embryo development. We observed that in maternal-excess crosses (4n mother x 2n father) the endosperm proliferation is rather suppressed whereas in paternal-excess crosses (2n mother x 4n father), the endosperm proliferation was unexpectedly promoted. We investigated Silene seed size in interploidy reciprocal crosses and determined embryo viability staining. Based on our results, we discuss the possible mechanism that led to the emergence of parental conflict in Silene and maternal control of seed development. |
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