Sexing pollen reveals female bias in a dioecious plant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
* Information on angiosperm sex ratios has largely been restricted to surveys of flowering individuals. These often deviate from equality, with male bias more commonly reported. Female-biased sex ratios are concentrated in a few taxa and have been linked to the possession of heteromorphic sex chromosomes and bias introduced during the gametophytic stage of the life cycle. It has been proposed that differences in gamete quantity and quality could give rise to female bias, although there is no direct evidence with which to evaluate this possibility. * Here, we use flow cytometry to investigate microgametophytic 'sex ratios' in a flowering plant. We demonstrate that differences in DNA content between the sexes in Rumex nivalis, a species with heteromorphic sex chromosomes, make it possible to distinguish female- vs male-determining pollen nuclei. * We found a small but significant female bias in microgametophytes produced by males (mean 0.515) with significant variation among family means (range 0.463-0.586), and 18 of 22 families averaging > 0.50. * The observed female bias at the gametophytic stage of the life cycle is consistent with the direction of bias previously reported for seeds and vegetative and reproductive plants in wild populations of R. nivalis, but is insufficient to fully explain the degree of bias.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".