Undergraduate Honors Thesis

 

PICKING PICKY FLOWERS: TESTING COMPATIBILITY SYSTEMS IN Physalis acutifolia AND THE PREDICTABILITY OF OUTCROSSING SUCCESS Public Deposited

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https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/undergraduate_honors_theses/rb68xc292
Abstract
  • Although the overarching process of plant breeding biology has received considerable attention in the plant sciences, few studies thoroughly examine the complexities of breeding system variability. Physalis acutifolia is a self-incompatible (SI) flowering plant in the Solanaceae family native to the southwestern United States. Self-incompatibility (SI) is a reproductive adaptation that serves to promote outcrossing and increase genetic fitness, and it is the opposite of self-compatibility (SC), which permits self-fertilization. Occasionally, certain species will be capable of employing more than one reproductive strategy. In P. acutifolia, specimens were collected from a variety of locations in the southwest U.S., and SI and SC populations were identified through preliminary crossing experiments in a greenhouse. Using these data, I focused on pollination crosses of SI and SC populations of P. acutifolia with three other species in the Physalis genus. These designed crosses contained a variety of SI and SC populations, and were intended to test the SI x SC hypothesis, which states that species that are self-compatible are also more likely to be compatible with an SI species, but the converse would not be true. Based on this previous work, I hypothesized that a SC female (the flower being pollinated) would be successfully fertilized by an SI male (the pollen donor), but that the reciprocal would not be true. Flowers received one of four treatments: emasculated and not crossed (negative control); crossed with individuals from the same location (positive control); pollinated with self pollen (experimental treatment 1); and crossed with individuals of a different species (experimental treatment 2). There was a statistically significant difference between the crossing outcomes of SI and SC species (p-value: 0.00247). However, there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that P. acutifolia consistently behaves as predicted by the SI x SC hypothesis. This experiment addresses the complexities of breeding systems, and is a necessary first step for understanding how and why such complexities occur.
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  • 2018-01-01
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  • 2019-12-02
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