Polyploidy and self-fertilization in flowering plants

Mating systems directly control the transmission of genes across generations, and understanding the diversity and distribution of mating systems is central to understanding the evolution of any group of organisms. This basic idea has been the motivation for many studies that have explored the relationships between plant mating systems and other biological and/or ecological phenomena, including a variety of floral and environmental characteristics, conspecific and pollinator densities, growth form, parity, and genetic architecture. In addition to these examples, a potentially important but poorly understood association is the relationship between plant mating systems and genome duplication, i.e., polyploidy. It is widely held that polyploid plants self-fertilize more than their diploid relatives, yet a formal analysis of this pattern does not exist. Data from 235 species of flowering plants were used to analyze the association between self-fertilization and ploidy. Phylogenetically independent contrasts and cross-species analyses both lend support to the hypothesis that polyploids self-fertilize more than diploids. Because polyploidy and self-fertilization are so common among angiosperms, these results contribute not only to our understanding of the relationship between mating systems and polyploidy in particular, but more generally, to our understanding of the evolution of flowering plants.