An investigation has revealed that plants, like animals, they also have a war between the sexes when it comes to creating new offspring.
The discovery could open new avenues of research that would lead to increased yields and improved food security for a global human population constantly growing.
In the animal kingdom, mothers tend to spend more resources than parents to create new offspring.
For mothers, the question is to balance between giving enough resources to keep their babies healthy and also create as many babies as possible. Instead, parents have benefited evolutionarily young to be as large as possible and most apt to survive.
Researchers at the University of Bath, of Exeter and Albrecht von Haller Institute for Plant Science in Germany have now shown that this battle between father and mother also exists in the plant kingdom.
The study shows for the first time that male plants can influence the size of the seeds.
Using the plant Arabidopsis as a model, the scientists crossed female plants with different male plants and measured the size of seed produced by each partner.
They found that the crossing of the female plant with some specific variety, or genotype, male plant produced larger seeds, allowing the father to have a healthier and more robust offspring at the expense of the mother.
As Paula Kover of University of Bath says, the size of the seed can make a tremendous difference in the likelihood that a seedling survives, so it would be expected that mothers produce an optimal seed size in an ideal balance between chances of survival and energy costs to produce them.
However, there is much variation in seed size. It has long been debated about the reason for this.
It was once thought that the seed size was controlled only by the genes of the mother, but has now been shown that genes of the parent plant may also have an effect on seed size.
The next step will be to identify specific genes that influence the size. Until now, the work of cultivating plants only took into account of the mother’s genes in the process of reproduction, so this study could open the door to a whole new group of genes with potential to increase crop yields.
Tags: paula kover research, university of bath research, war of sexes