Chromosome numbers and fertility studies of 73 male and 30 female flowering germplasm accessions of Dioscorea alata L. were carried out. All males were tetraploids showing the same chromosome number (n = 20 or 2n :-40) and were pollen fertile (10.9-96.2%), most of them being highly fertile. Among the female the majority were higher ploids (hexa-and octoploids; 2n = 60 and 80) and sexually completely sterile. There were only two tetraploid female accessions which were sexually fertile. Pollination studies revealed that seed sterility in D. alata was due to female sterility associated with the occurrence of higher levels of ploidy. The female sex-limited occurrence of higher polyploidy and sterility observed in D. alata is a curious situation among dioecious higher plants.

Mating was studied in the haploid, heterothallic yeast Clavispora opuntiae to assess the importance of nutritional, genetic, and other factors that may favour mating and recombination. Local populations of this yeast generally exhibit dramatic inequalities in mating type distributions, suggesting that mating is rare in nature even though most isolates mate freely in the laboratory. The absence of assimilable nitrogen is prerequisite to mating competence, presumably by causing G1 arrest. Maximum mating competence is found in cells entering stationary phase in nitrogen-limited media. Unlike the vast majority of mating yeasts, C. opuntiae does not appear to produce diffusible mating factors (sex pheromones), and mating-competent cells do not undergo sexual agglutination. Pairwise cell contact appears to be the only signal that triggers the sexual process in this case. In order to determine if mating type imbalances in nature are caused by reduced fertility of 'consanguine' crosses, meiotic recombination was measured in pairs of strains that varied in their genetic distances as indicated by restriction mapping. That hypothesis was rejected, as recombination efficiency decreased with increasing genetic distance. We conclude that the rarity of mating in local populations is exacerbated by the stringent physical (pairwise cell contact) and nutritional (nitrogen depletion) conditions that will allow mating to proceed. Parallels are drawn with mating patterns observed in Clavispora lusitaniae.

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