Plant Parentage, Pollination, and Dispersal: How DNA Microsatellites Have Altered the Landscape

By Mary V. Ashley. 2010

240 citations recorded by the source corpus.

DNA microsatellites provide plant ecologists with molecular markers precise enough to assign parentage to seeds and seedlings. This allows the exact distance and trajectory of successful pollen to be traced to characterize pollination patterns. Parentage assignment of established seedlings also allows researchers to accurately determine how far new recruits have traveled from their seed parent. This paper reviews the history and development of molecular parentage assignment in studies of native plants, as well as the limitations and constraints to this approach. This paper also reviews 53 articles published in the past 15 years that use parentage assignment to study pollination and seed dispersal in native plants. These parentage studies have overturned many common assumptions regarding pollen and seed dispersal patterns. They show that long-distance dispersal of pollen is common in both wind and animal dispersed systems, with average pollination distances commonly being hundreds of meters. The pollination neighborhood is often extremely large, and simple dispersal functions based on distance alone fail to make accurate predictions of pollination. Rather than hindering gene flow, fragmentation and isolation sometimes, and perhaps even commonly, results in increased pollination distances. Studies of seed dispersal using parentage assignment have also yielded some surprises. We now know that it may be erroneous to assume that seeds growing under the crown of a conspecific adult are growing beneath their mother, or that seed dispersal distances are more limited than pollen dispersal distances. Taken together, the studies to date demonstrate that both seed and pollen dispersal are quite complex phenomena influenced by many ecological processes.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b13730f2fa6a9223f185ac07080ab73258b0b691

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. S. Barrett
2. Pedro Jordano
3. J. Arroyo
4. J. P. González-Varo
5. Lawrence D. Harder
6. Jordi Bascompte
7. Paulo Roberto Guimaraes Jr.
8. J. Olesen

In Genetics

1. J. Arroyo
2. S. Barrett
3. Pedro Jordano
4. Lawrence D. Harder
5. Jordi Bascompte
6. J. Olesen
7. Paulo Roberto Guimaraes Jr.

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. S. Barrett
2. Pedro Jordano
3. J. Arroyo
4. J. P. González-Varo
5. Lawrence D. Harder
6. Daniel García
7. K. Lunau
8. A. Hampe

Citations in the corpus

• The Ecology of Mating and Its Evolutionary Consequences in Seed Plants (2017, background): “The recent availability of highly polymorphic genetic markers enables measurement of siring success and mate diversity (Ashley 2010), fostering a more comprehensive view of plant mating that extends beyond the classic outcrossing-selfing paradigm (Barrett 2003).”
• Who dispersed the seeds? The use of DNA barcoding in frugivory and seed dispersal studies (2014, background): “The identification of the source of dispersed seeds, which enables direct estimates of dispersal distances and the detection of habitat transitions, has been achieved by a diverse array of methods such as direct observations of disperser foraging activity (G omez 2003), microsatellite DNA markers (G”