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Comment
. 2017 Feb;29(2):202-206.
doi: 10.1105/tpc.16.00836. Epub 2017 Feb 17.

Picking up the Ball at the K/Pg Boundary: The Distribution of Ancient Polyploidies in the Plant Phylogenetic Tree as a Spandrel of Asexuality with Occasional Sex

Michael Freeling  1
Affiliations
Comment

Picking up the Ball at the K/Pg Boundary: The Distribution of Ancient Polyploidies in the Plant Phylogenetic Tree as a Spandrel of Asexuality with Occasional Sex

Michael Freeling. Plant Cell. 2017 Feb.
No abstract available

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Schematic Tree of Evolutionary Relationships for Sequenced Plants. Ancient plant polyploidies (orange rectangles) are distributed with respect to the inferred Cretaceous (K)/Tertiary (Pg) boundary (centered around the vertical brown line). Lighter colored rectangles indicate whole-genome duplications estimated between 55 and 75 million years old (shaded area around the K/Pg boundary). Only lineages that survived to this day are shown. (Reproduced from Lohaus and Van de Peer [2016], http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pbi.2016.01.006, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Hypothetical Tree of Plant Extinction and Survival during a Mass Extinction Event. An imaginary illustration in the style of Figure 1, but with lineages (blue lines) shown that go extinct as well as the one lineage that is continuous from the nonpolyploid ancestor on the left to the present. If the line is wide with a glow, that lineage reproduces largely asexually. The red arrow marks a rare, successful diploidization event. Note that the thin blue lines, the sexual lineages, do not cross the K/Pg boundary (vertical brown line) and that a nonpolyploid asexual lineage (upper line) does cross the boundary, but then goes extinct.
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