The walls surrounding the cells of all land-based plants provide mechanical support
essential for growth and development as well as protection from adverse environmental …

Pollen-pistil interactions serve as important prezygotic reproductive barriers that play a
critical role in mate selection in plants. Here, we highlight recent progress toward …

Global trade has considerably accelerated biological invasions. The annual tropical
teosintes, the closest wild relatives of maize, were recently reported as new agricultural …

Breakdown of reproductive isolation facilitates flow of useful trait genes into crop plants from
their wild relatives. Hybrid sterility, a major form of reproductive isolation exists between …

Self-incompatibility (SI) is a widespread genetically determined system in flowering plants
that prevents self-fertilization to promote gene flow and limit inbreeding. S-RNase–based SI …

Unilateral cross incompatibility (UCI) occurs between popcorn and dent corn, and
represents a critical step towards speciation. It has been reported that ZmGa1P, encoding a …

The shift from outcrossing to self-fertilization (selfing) is considered one of the most prevalent
evolutionary transitions in flowering plants. Selfing species tend to share similar …

Research in angiosperm sexual reproduction is among the most classical botanical studies
with a rich knowledge base. The introduction of molecular tools since the late 1970s …

Maize unilateral cross-incompatibility (UCI) that causes non-Mendelian segregation ratios
has been documented for more than a century. Ga1, Ga2, and Tcb1 are three major UCI …

In flowering plants, pollen tubes undergo a journey that starts in the stigma and ends in the
ovule with the delivery of the sperm cells to achieve double fertilization. The pollen cell wall …