New Genes Evolve to Prevent Inbreeding in Plants

A new research led by biologists at McGill University studied inbreeding, a deleterious process that raises the risk of expressing bad copies of a gene and producing inbred progenies with reduced viability. Inbreeding is a complex process that involves the interaction of a gene that tags the pollen with an identifier molecule, and a gene that produces a molecule that can detect the pollen produced by the same plant.

In the plant group Leavenworthia, the ancestral genes that code for self-pollen recognition were lost in the evolutionary process, but the function seem to have been taken up by two other genes that originally may have had another role. Self-incompatibility, the pollen recognition system that allows plants to avoid inbreeding by self-pollination, involves tightly linked genes called the S locus. In the McGill study led by researcher Sier-Ching Chantha, they found out that plants in Leavenworthia group have two other linked genes showing patterns similar to the S locus, and these genes are in the same genomic position in Leavenworthia. Chantha and his group then suggest that these genes have evolved to assume the function of the pollen recognition system of self-incompatibility in Leavenworthia."

Results of the team's research were published in the journal PLOS Biology with the following link: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001560. For more information about this research, read the news release: https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/how-does-inbreeding-avoidance-evolve-plants-227055.