Maternal effects on seed traits such as germination are important components of the life
histories of plants because they represent the pathway from adult to offspring: the pathway …

Maternal effects, which include the contribution of the maternal parent to the offspring
beyond the equal chromosome contribution of each parent, may be produced by different …

Continuous development, the absence of a germline, flexible and reversible cellular
differentiation, and the existence of haploid and diploid generations—both of which express …

The environment during seed production has major impacts on the behaviour of progeny
seeds. It can be shown that for annual plants temperature perception over the whole life …

Flowering plants exhibit two principal life-history strategies: annuality (living and
reproducing in one year) and perenniality (living more than one year). The advantages of …

Maternal effects are ubiquitous in nature. In plants, most work has focused on the effects of
maternal environments on offspring trait expression. Less is known about the prevalence of …

Clonal plant life histories are special in at least four respects:(1) Clonal plants can also
reproduce vegetatively,(2) vegetative reproduction can be realised with short or long …

Background Understanding the mechanisms that control species genetic structure has
always been a major objective in evolutionary studies. The association between genetic …

Evolutionary transitions are functionally significant changes in organismal traits that largely
result from the action of natural selection. They first appear within populations when novel …

This paper discusses how field and laboratory experiments, using a variety of genetic
material, can be combined to investigate the genetic basis of germination under realistic …