Abstract
Prospero Alpini was an Italian physician, botanist and scientist. Born in Marostica, in the Republic of Venice, in his youth he served in the Milanese army, but in 1574 he decided to study medicine at the University of Padova, where he graduated in 1578. After a short period as a doctor in Camposampiero (Padova, Italy), he became the personal doctor of Giorgio Emo, the appointed consul in Cairo in Egypt. In this way, he was able to devote himself to the study of botany. In this country, from the cultivation practices of the date palm, he described for the first time the sexual dimorphism in plants, later adopted as the basis of Linnaeus’ scientific classification system. Since then, this behavior, termed dioecy, has been described in other plant species, and many advances have been made in understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, especially with the advent of genomics. Starting from a brief description of Prospero’s life and his pioneering scientific contribution, we illustrated the two main models explaining dioecism. This was achieved by taking a cue from two plant species, grapevine and poplar, in which genomics and single molecule sequencing technologies played a pivotal role in scientific advance in this field.
Highlights
Dioecy in AngiospermsAccording to the World Flora Online (WFO), a compendium of the world’s plant species, around 350,000 plant species have been so far cataloged [2]
After a short period as a doctor in Camposampiero (Padova, Italy), he became the personal doctor of Giorgio Emo, the appointed consul in Cairo in Egypt
We focus on some examples of plant species for which, thanks to advances in genomics, it was possible to finely characterize the sex-determining region (SDR) and define the model at the basis of dioecy: Vitis spp. for the two-gene system and Populus spp. for the one-gene system
Summary
According to the World Flora Online (WFO), a compendium of the world’s plant species, around 350,000 plant species have been so far cataloged [2]. The rare occurrence of dioecy in flowering plants is considered the consequence of two main disadvantages: the lack of reproductive assurance of individuals and the fact that virtually only half of the population (female plants) can carry the seeds and produce offspring [7] This led to the hypothesis that this behavior could be considered an evolutionary dead end of angiosperms with higher probabilities of extinction and lower diversification rates [8]. Assuming that dioecy does not represent the ancestral condition of angiosperms, it can be stated, with a certain safety margin, that this sexual system has originated independently multiple times in different families, to other sexual behaviors (e.g., apomixis) [12] In support of this is the fact that dioecy and monoecy coexist within hundreds of families and that, within the same family, there are simultaneously cases of male and female heterogamety. Several genera including Populus and Salix (Salicaceae) [14,15], Silene (Caryophyllaceae) [16] and Dioscorea (Dioscoreaceae) [17] present both species with XX/XY and ZW/ZZ sexual systems, suggesting the concrete possibility that shifts between different sex chromosome systems (XY ↔ ZW) are feasible within the animal kingdom—where multiple cases have been reported in several phyla [18,19]—and in plants [16,17]
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