First published online September 5, 2008; 10.1105/tpc.108.060327
The Plant Cell 20:2286-2292 (2008)
© 2008 American Society of Plant Biologists
RNase-Based Self-Incompatibility: Puzzled by Pollen S[W]
Ed Newbigina,
Timothy Paapeb and
Joshua R. Kohnb
a School of Botany, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
b Section of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, Division of Biological Sciences, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093
1 Address correspondence to edwardjn{at}unimelb.edu.au and jkohn{at}ucsd.edu.
ABSTRACT
Many plants have a genetically determined self-incompatibility system in which the rejection of self pollen grains is controlled by alleles of an S locus. A common feature of these S loci is that separate pollen- and style-expressed genes (pollen S and style S, respectively) determine S allele identity. The long-held view has been that pollen S and style S must be a coevolving gene pair in order for allelic recognition to be maintained as new S alleles arise. In at least three plant families, the Solanaceae, Rosaceae, and Plantaginaceae, the style S gene has long been known to encode an extracellular ribonuclease called the S-RNase. Pollen S in these families has more recently been identified and encodes an F-box protein known as either SLF or SFB. In this perspective, we describe the puzzling evolutionary relationship that exists between the SLF/SFB and S-RNase genes and show that in most cases cognate pairs of genes are not coevolving in the expected manner. Because some pollen S genes appear to have arisen much more recently than their style S cognates, we conclude that either some pollen S genes have been falsely identified or that there is a major problem with our understanding of how the S locus evolves.
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