Collaborative Research: DNA "Fingerprinting" to Estimate Male and Female Fitness in Heliopsis helianthoides (Asteraceae)

大多数开花植物既有雄性又有雌性， 花粉或种子的产生。 理论认为 雌性生殖成功通常受到资源的限制 用于种子生产。 植物的雄性功能是 受植物传播花粉能力的限制。 这导致 花对传粉者的吸引力 对种子生产的影响相对有限，但 这对花粉的传播有很大的影响，因此， 植物作为一个男性。 尽管这一预测的重要性，男性 适应性的演变，花卉吸引力，分布 自然种群中父系的繁殖成功率 非常难以测量。 DNA“指纹”可以用来 在植物种群中明确地确定亲子关系， 从而估计父系的繁殖成功率。 方法将 来衡量父亲和母亲的健康状况 草原植物Heliopsis helianthoides的合作研究， 具有密集的现场和实验室组成部分。 三 目的是：1）记录H.类向日葵 高变基因座; 2）确定遗传方式， 3）使用已知百分比的幼苗来确定是否 高变基因座可用于在野生动物中分配亲子关系， 种群H.类向日葵 这项工作将有助于 应用DNA“指纹”技术所需的基本数据 对目前关于植物进化的假说的评价 结构.

Most flowering plants function as both male and females, through the production of either pollen or seeds. Theory suggests that female reproductive success is usually limited by resources available for seed production. The male function in plants is limited by the ability of the plant to disperse pollen. This leads to the prediction that the attractiveness of flowers to pollinators has relatively limited effect on the production of seed, but a large effect on the dispersal of pollen, and hence the fitness of the plant as a male. Despite this predicted importance of male fitness to the evolution of floral attraction, the distribution of paternal reproductive success in natural populations has been exceedingly difficult to measure. DNA "fingerprinting" can be used to determine paternity unambiguously in plant populations, and therefore to estimate paternal reproductive success. Methods will be developed to measure paternal and maternal fitness in the prairie plant Heliopsis helianthoides in a collaborative study that has both intensive field and laboratory components. The three objectives are: 1) to document variation among H. helianthoides for hypervariable loci; 2) to determine the mode of inheritance for these loci; 3) to use seedlings of known percentage to determine if the hypervariable loci can be used to assign paternity in a wild population of H. helianthoides. This work will contribute the basic data necessary to apply the technique of DNA "fingerprinting" to the evaluation of current hypotheses on the evolution of floral structures.