Evolution of an Apomixis-Specific Allele Class in Supernumerary Chromatin of Apomictic Boechera
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Asexual reproduction through seeds in plants (i.e., apomixis) is a heritable trait, and apomixis- linked loci have been identified in multiple species. However, direct identification of genomic elements is typically hindered as apomixis-linked loci and are commonly found in recombination-suppressed and repetitive regions. Heterochromatinized elements, such as B chromosomes and other supernumerary chromosomal DNA fragments have long been known to be associated with asexuality in both plants and animals and are prime candidate regions for the evolution of multiple apomixis factors controlling the individual elements of apomixis. Here, we examined molecular evolution, gene regulation, and chromosomal location of a male apomeiosis factor ( UPG2 ), a long noncoding RNA gene, in sexual and apomictic Boechera with and without male apomeiosis (i.e., balanced and unbalanced apomicts). We revealed the origin of the gene in the apomixis genome on an apomixis-specific, supernumerary heterochromatic Boechera chromosome ( Boe1 ). The UPG2 is active in the tapetum at male meiosis. We found allele classes specific to apomictic and sexual Boechera accessions and a third class that shares the features of both and points to a convergent transition state. Sex alleles are found only in some of the sexual accessions and have higher nucleotide divergence and lower transcriptional activity compared to apo alleles. These data demonstrate selective pressure to maintain the function of UPG2 for unreduced pollen formation in apomicts as the occasional transmission of the allele from unbalanced apomicts into sexual organisms that lead to pseudogenization and functional decay of copies in sexual organisms.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".