Pam and Doug Soltis, distinguished professors with the Florida Museum of Natural History, discuss the importance of Tragopogon, a flowering plant in the sunflower family, and its role in helping understand more about the polyploids.
Polyploids are organisms with more than two sets of chromosomes and represent a large number of agricultural crops. The Soltises are analyzing Tragopogon to gain a better understanding of the process of genome change and evolution in polyploidy organisms.
Interview and videos produced by Peter Byarr for Explore Research at the University of Florida.
Transcript
Pam Soltis: Our research involves studies of two species of Tragopogon which represented excellent examples of polyploidy.
Doug Soltis: There are a number of ways in which polyploids can form. In one very simple view we can have species one hybridized with species two. If they each have twelve chromosomes that hybrid will also have twelve chromosomes, but that hybrid will be sterile because there will be chromosome pairing problems in that hybrid. However, if the chromosomes of that hybrid were to be doubled and now every chromosome would be represented twice we would have a fertile polyploid and it would be an instant new species.
Pam Soltis: Our work on Tragopogon essentially serves as a model for helping us to understand more about the genomes and genes of polyploid plants. So this potentially has benefits for understanding crop plants and in fact most of our crops are polyploid, so wheat, corn, broccoli, all of these represent examples of polyploids, and it’s probably through polyploidy that increased yield and increased size have led to the domestication of these species.
Doug Soltis: Polyploidy is this very important evolutionary mechanism. It’s important in much of the plant world. It’s very important in vertebrates. So how do you understand the early stages of this process? There are only a few plants where we actually know when they arose as polyploids, and Tragopogon is one of these.
Another reason why tragopogon is important for studying polyploidy is that it’s part of a big family called the sunflower family. The polyploid tragopogon that we’re studying in North America are about 80 years old and then there are further or ancient polyploid events in the sunflower family that maybe 20 million years old and others that are 40 million years old, so this gives us a continuum of ages that we can study across one group of flowering plants from very young to very old and it really will help us learn a lot about the process of genome change in evolution in polyploid organisms.
Learn more about the Molecular Systematics & Evolutionary Genetics Lab at the Florida Museum.