The puzzle of plant hybridisation: a high propensity to hybridise but few hybrid zones reported

Abstract

An interesting conundrum was recently revealed by R. Abbott when he found that the number of hybrid zones reported in the literature for plants is very low, given the propensity of plants to hybridise. In another literature survey on hybrid zones performed over the period 1970–2022, we found that the number of hybrid zones reported for vertebrates was 2.3 times greater than that reported for vascular plants, even though there are about six times more vascular plant species than vertebrates. Looking at the number of papers reporting hybrid zones, there are 4.9 times more on vertebrates than on vascular plants. These figures support the relevance of this conundrum. In this paper we aim to shed light on this question by providing a structured discussion of the causes that may underlie this conundrum. We propose six non-mutually exclusive factors, namely lack or deficit of spatial structure, lack or deficit of genetic structure, effects of hybridisation between non-closely related species, lability of plant hybrid zones over time, botanists’ perception of hybridisation, and deficit of population genetic data. There does not appear to be a single factor that explains our puzzle, which applies to all cases of plants where hybridisation is detected but no hybrid zone is reported. It is argued that some plant features suggest that the puzzle is not, at least entirely, due to insufficient knowledge of the specific cases, a hypothesis that should be addressed with a wider range of empirical data across different taxonomic groups.

Hybrids as mirrors of the past: genomic footprints reveal spatio-temporal dynamics and extinction risk of alpine extremophytes in the mountains of Central Asia

“…Hybridization is one of the key drivers that shape the evolutionary history of Earth’s biodiversity ( Mallet, 2005 ; Soltis and Soltis, 2009 ; Taylor and Larson, 2019 ). Reticulate processes can trigger far-reaching and often contrasting consequences in various biological systems ( Abbott et al., 2016 ; Runemark et al., 2019 ; Nieto Feliner et al., 2023 ). Interspecific gene flow may promote diversification and adaptive divergence ( Edelman et al., 2019 ; Hodel et al., 2022 ; Slovák et al., 2023 ) or, alternatively, homogenize previously distinct parental lineages, including unique geographic or ecological variants ( Todesco et al., 2016 ; Goulet et al., 2017 ).…”