About this Research Topic
Hybridization has played a critical role in plant evolution, facilitating evolutionary diversification from adaptive introgression, reinforcement, to hybrid speciation, yet it may also lead to the extinction of rare species. Global changes, including climate and geological changes, industrialization, environmental degradation, and global trade and travel, could have caused numerous hybridization events by breaking the previous genetic barriers to gene flow. The accelerating transformation of the world’s biota in the recent decades threatens plants with extinction in one way, yet also provides an unprecedented opportunity to study large numbers of unplanned hybridization “experiments”. At the same time, new advancements in genomic and genetic tools are revolutionizing our ability to document and investigate these past and present hybridization events. Now is the time to study this basic biological phenomenon to deeply explore and conserve current global biodiversity.
Hundreds of cases involving hybridization have been recorded in the past years, though mostly based on a few nuclear or chloroplast loci and morphological characters. The advances in next-generation sequencing technologies can yield hundreds of informative loci at a relatively low cost. Together with an expansion of bioinformatic analysis tools, many orders of magnitude in the amount of data could be generated to provide finer resolution on hybridization processes across the genome, allowing inference of selection, demographic history, and admixture patterns across timescales.
We welcome the submission of different article types, including original research papers, methods, reviews, mini-reviews, perspectives, etc., on the following subthemes but not limited to:
• Molecular evidence for natural hybridization under global changes
• The role of hybridization in plant adaptation to environmental changes
• Hybridization and plant invasion
• Hybridization and conservation of endangered plant species
Hundreds of cases involving hybridization have been recorded in the past years, though mostly based on a few nuclear or chloroplast loci and morphological characters. The advances in next-generation sequencing technologies can yield hundreds of informative loci at a relatively low cost. Together with an expansion of bioinformatic analysis tools, many orders of magnitude in the amount of data could be generated to provide finer resolution on hybridization processes across the genome, allowing inference of selection, demographic history, and admixture patterns across timescales.
We welcome the submission of different article types, including original research papers, methods, reviews, mini-reviews, perspectives, etc., on the following subthemes but not limited to:
• Molecular evidence for natural hybridization under global changes
• The role of hybridization in plant adaptation to environmental changes
• Hybridization and plant invasion
• Hybridization and conservation of endangered plant species
Keywords: hybridization, introgression, reticulation, gene flow
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