Polyploidy, evolutionary opportunity, and crop adaptation

The finding that even the smallest of plant genomes has incurred multiple genome-wide chromatin duplication events, some of which may predate the origins of the angiosperms and therefore shape all of flowering plant biology, adds new importance to the molecular analysis of polyploidization/diploidization cycles and their phenotypic consequences. Early clues as to the possible phenotypic consequences of polyploidy derive from recent QTL mapping efforts in a number of diverse crop plants of recent and well-defined polyploid origins. A small sampling examples of the role(s) of polyploidy in conferring crop adaptation from human needs include examples of (1) dosage effects of multiple alleles in autopolyploids, and (2) 'intergenomic heterosis' conferring novel traits or transgressive levels of existing traits, associated with merging divergent genomes in a common allopolyploid nucleus. A particularly interesting manifestation of #2 is the evolution of complementary alleles at corresponding ('homoeologous') loci in divergent polyploid taxa derived from a common ancestor. Burgeoning genomic data for both botanical models and major crops offer new avenues for investigation of the molecular and phenotypic consequences of polyploidy, promising new insights into the role of this important process in the evolution of botanical diversity.