Many plant leaves have two layers of photosynthetic tissue: the palisade and spongy meso- phyll. Whereas palisade mesophyll consists of tightly packed columnar cells, the structure of spongy mesophyll is not well characterized and often treated as a …
Urbanization transforms environments in ways that alter biological evolution. We examined whether urban environmental change drives parallel evolution by sampling 110,019 white clover plants from 6169 populations in 160 cities globally. Plants were …
Genome size in cellular organisms varies by six orders of magnitude, yet the cause of this large variation remains unexplained. The influential Drift-Barrier Hypothesis proposes that large genomes tend to evolve in small populations due to …
Information, energy, and matter are fundamental properties of all levels of biological organization, and life emerges from the continuous flux of matter, energy, and information. This perspective piece defines and explains each of the three pillars …
Understanding how floral traits affect reproduction is key for understanding genetic diversity, speciation, and trait evolution in the face of global changes and pollinator decline. However, there has not yet been a unified framework to characterize …
There are multiple hypotheses for the spectacular plant diversity found in deserts. We explore how different factors, including the roles of ecological opportunity and selection, pro- mote diversification and disparification in Encelia, a lineage of …
Natural selection is an important driver of genetic and phenotypic differentiation between species. For species in which potential gene flow is high but realized gene flow is low, adaptation via natural selection may be a particularly important force …