Naturalized plants have smaller genomes than their non-invading relatives: a flow cytometric analysis of the Czech alien flora

Title:

Naturalized plants have smaller genomes than their non-invading relatives: a flow cytometric analysis of the Czech alien flora
Naturalizované rostliny mají menší genom než neinvadující druhy: cytometrická analýza nepůvodních druhů české květeny

Creator:

Kubešová, Magdalena, Moravcová, Lenka, Suda, Jan, Jarošík, Vojtěch, and Pyšek, Petr

Identifier:

https://cdk.lib.cas.cz/client/handle/uuid:533bb543-205e-415d-e3c8-aabe536e545d
uuid:533bb543-205e-415d-e3c8-aabe536e545d

Subject:

alien plants, confamilials, congeners, C-value, flow cytometry, genome size, invasive species, large genome constraint hypothesis, nuclear DNA content, and plant invasions

Type:

article and TEXT

Description:

Genome size has been suggested as one of the traits associated with invasiveness of plant species. To provide a quantitative insight into the role of this trait, we estimated nuclearDNAcontent in 93 alien species naturalized in the Czech Republic, belonging to 32 families, by using flow cytometry, and compared it with the values reported for non-invading congeneric and confamilial species from the Plant DNA C-values database. Species naturalized in the Czech Republic have significantly smaller genomes than their congeners not known to be naturalized or invasive in any part of the world. This trend is supported at the family level: alien species naturalized in the Czech flora have on average a smaller genome than is the mean value for non-invading confamilials. Moreover, naturalized and non-invading species clearly differed in the frequency of five genome size categories; this difference was mainly due to very small genomes prevailing and intermediate to very large genomes underrepresented in the former group. Our results provide the first quantitative support for association of genome size with invasiveness, based on a large set of alien species across a number of plant families. However, there was no difference in the genome size of invasive species compared to naturalized but non-invasive. This suggests that small genome size provides alien plants with an advantage already at the stage of naturalization and need not be necessarily associated with the final stage of the process, i.e. invasion.

Language:

English

Rights:

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/

Source:

Preslia | 2010 Volume:82 | Number:1

Harvested from:

CDK

Metadata only:

false