ArticleJournal of evolutionary biology2021
Enhanced leaky sex expression in response to pollen limitation in the dioecious plant Mercurialis annua.
Article in Journal of evolutionary biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sex-specific ethylene responses drive floral sexual plasticity in Cannabis sativa.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2026Article
- Sex-allocation trade-offs and their genetic architecture revealed by experimental evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Gibberellin pathway remodeling accompanies ethylene-driven sex reversal inFrontiers in plant science · 2026Article
- Reversibility of sex changes in the plant kingdom: more important than we thought?Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Dioecy in a wind-pollinated herb explained by disruptive selection on sex allocation via inbreeding avoidance.The New phytologist · 2025Article
- The evolution of separate sexes in waterhemp is associated with surprising chromosomal diversity and complexity.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Why should we study plant sex chromosomes?The Plant cell · 2024Review
- Dioecy and chromosomal sex determination are maintained through allopolyploid speciation in the plant genus Mercurialis.PLoS genetics · 2022Article
- Labile sex expression in angiosperm species with sex chromosomes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Recurrent allopolyploidization, Y-chromosome introgression and the evolution of sexual systems in the plant genusPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Are plant and animal sex chromosomes really all that different?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Simulated herbivory enhances leaky sex expression in the dioecious herb Mercurialis annua.Annals of botany · 2022Article
- Disentangling the effects of jasmonate and tissue loss on the sex allocation of an annual plant.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Enhanced leaky sex expression in response to pollen limitation in the dioecious plant Mercurialis annua.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2021Article
- Genome assembly of the basket willow, Salix viminalis, reveals earliest stages of sex chromosome expansion.BMC biology · 2020Article
- Sex Chromosome Evolution: So Many Exceptions to the Rules.Genome biology and evolution · 2020Review
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In dioecious plants, males and females frequently show 'leaky' sex expression, with individuals occasionally producing flowers of the opposite sex. This leaky sex expression may have enabled the colonization of oceanic islands by dioecious plant species, and it is likely to represent the sort of variation upon which selection acts to bring about evolutionary transitions from dioecy to hermaphroditism. Although leakiness is commonly reported for dioecious species, it is not known whether it has plastic component. The question is interesting because males or females with an ability to enhance their leakiness plastically in the absence of mates would have an advantage of being able to produce progeny by self-fertilization. Here, we demonstrate that leaky sex expression in the wind-pollinated dioecious herb Mercurialis annua is plastically responsive to its mating context. We compared experimental populations of females growing either with or without males. Females growing in the absence of males were leakier in their sex expression than controls growing with males, producing more than twice as many male flowers. Our results thus provide a striking instance of plasticity in the reproductive behaviour of plants that is likely adaptive. We consider how females might sense their mating environment as a function of pollen availability, and we discuss possible constraints on the evolution of plasticity in sex expression when the environmental signals that individuals receive are unreliable.
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