Genetic determination of gender is a fundamental developmental and evolutionary process
in plants. Although it appears that dioecy in Populus is genetically controlled, the precise
gender-determining systems remain unclear. The recently released second draft assembly
and annotated gene set of the Populus genome provided an opportunity to revisit this topic.
We hypothesized that over evolutionary time, selective pressure has reformed the genome
structure and gene composition in the peritelomeric region of the chromosome XIX, which …