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Published Online July 26, 2007
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1143153

Reports

Submitted on March 28, 2007
Accepted on July 17, 2007

The Evolution of Selfing in Arabidopsis thaliana

Chunlao Tang 1, Christopher Toomajian 1, Susan Sherman-Broyles 2, Vincent Plagnol 3, Ya-Long Guo 4, Tina T. Hu 5, Richard M. Clark 4, June B. Nasrallah 2, Detlef Weigel 6, Magnus Nordborg 1*

1 Molecular and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
2 Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
3 Molecular and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA; JDRF/WT Diabetes and Inflammation laboratory, University of Cambridge, Wellcome Trust/MRC Building, Cambridge, CB2 2XY, UK.
4 Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, 72076 Tübingen, Germany.
5 Molecular and Computational Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA.
6 Department of Molecular Biology, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, 72076 Tübingen, Germany; Plant Biology Laboratory, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Magnus Nordborg , E-mail: magnus{at}usc.edu

Unlike most of its close relatives, Arabidopsis thaliana is capable of self-pollination. In other members of the mustard family, outcrossing is ensured by the complex self-incompatibility (S) locus, which harbors multiple diverged specificity haplotypes that effectively prevent selfing. We investigated the role of the S locus in the evolution of and transition to selfing in A. thaliana. We found that the S locus of A. thaliana harbored considerable diversity, an apparent remnant of polymorphism in the outcrossing ancestor. Thus, the fixation of a single inactivated S locus allele cannot have been a key step in the transition to selfing. An analysis of the genome-wide pattern of linkage disequilibrium (LD) suggests that selfing most likely evolved roughly a million years ago or more.


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