A study on beetleweed shows that autopolyploid plants with different chromosome sets can coexist, reshaping how scientists ...

Plant biologists have long suspected polyploidy -- the heritable acquisition of extra chromosome sets -- was a gateway to speciation. But the consensus was that polyploidy is a minor force.

Still, there's reason to believe that our impact on speciation is significant. In a 2015 paper, biologist Chris Thomas reported that over the last 300 years, more new plant species, primarily ...

Trees get most of the love, but diatoms, a group of photosynthetic microalgae, produce 20% of Earth's oxygen and are the ...

and specifically speciation that occurs when a subset of a population shifts onto a novel host, is one of the main routes for the emergence of new fungal diseases in plants, argue the authors of a ...

Titled "Factors influencing progress toward sympatric speciation," the paper appears in today's edition of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. New species more commonly occur when plants or ...

"Plants are often self-fertilizing, so it can then start a whole population," UCSB said. Even in the animal kingdom, speciation can happen on human-observable timescales, particularly among quick ...

The biological equivalent is "allopatric speciation," an evolutionary process in which one species divides into two because the original homogenous population has become separated and both groups ...

Speciation occurs in a limited geographical ... These findings underline the importance of protecting this group of plants. More information: Lizzie Roeble et al, Island biogeography of the ...

But the issue remains contentious: Hybridization has been definitively shown to cause widespread speciation only in plants. When it comes to animals, it has remained a hypothesis (albeit one that’s ...