The role of self-incompatibility systems in the prevention of bi-parental inbreeding
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
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Abstract
Hermaphroditic plants experience inbreeding through both self-fertilization and bi-parental inbreeding. Therefore, many plant species have evolved either heteromorphic (morphology-based) or homomorphic (molecular-based) self-incompatibility (SI) systems. These SI systems limit extreme inbreeding through self-fertilization and, in the case of homomorphic SI systems, have the potential to limit bi-parental inbreeding, which is common when dispersal is restricted to a local region. Homomorphic SI species are prevalent across the angiosperms, and it is often assumed that the potential to reduce bi-parental inbreeding may be a factor in their success. To test this assumption, we developed a spatially-explicit, individual-based simulation of plant populations with either heteromorphic SI or one of three different types of homomorphic SI. In our simulations, we varied dispersal distance and the presence of inbreeding depression. We found that autozygosity in the homomorphic SI populations was significantly lower than in the heteromorphic SI populations and that this reduction was due to bi-parental inbreeding avoidance. As expected, the differences between the homomorphic and heteromorphic SI populations were more pronounced when seed and pollen dispersal was limited. However, levels of homozygosity and inbreeding depression between these plant populations were not different. At low dispersal, homomorphic SI populations also suffered reduced female fecundity and had smaller census population sizes. Our results suggest that bi-parental inbreeding avoidance was unlikely to be a major driver in the evolution of homomorphic SI systems.
Cite this as
2017. The role of self-incompatibility systems in the prevention of bi-parental inbreeding. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3042v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3042v1note This preprint is not peer-reviewed. You may wish to reference the subsequent peer-reviewed version of this article.
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This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
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Competing Interests
Reed A. Cartwright is an Academic Editor for PeerJ.
Author Contributions
Tara N Furstenau conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Reed A Cartwright conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
Simulation source code is available at https://github.com/tfursten/SI-cpp
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
