title: How did flowering plants learn to avoid blind date mistakes? Self-incompatibility in plants and comparisons with nonself rejection in the immune response.
abstract: Self-incompatibility (SI) is a common form of genetically-controlled mate-selection that prevents mating between closely related plants of the same species. SI occurs in about half of all flowering plant species. It has been studied extensively in the Papaveraceae (poppy), Brassicaceae (Arabidopsis, cabbage etc), Solanaceae (potato, tomato etc), Plantaginaceae (snapdragon) and Rosaceae (apple, cherry and peach etc). The self-recognition inherent in self-incompatibility has similarities with animal and plant immunity systems giving rise to speculation that the systems are related. Both systems display balancing selection, 'self/nonself' recognition, high polymorphism, high specificity and there are also some similarities in the rejection mechanisms deployed in the two systems. Whether these systems have diverged from a common predecessor is discussed, however similarities may be driven more by biological problems and the available molecular machinery to solve them than by an evolutionary relationship.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biochemistry, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA. kearp@missouri.edu
authors.forename: Philip J
authors.initials: PJ
authors.lastname: Kear
authors.forename: Bruce
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: McClure
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D019684:Magnoliopsida / Q000502:physiology*; D057865:Plant Immunity / Q000502:physiology*; D060436:Self-Incompatibility in Flowering Plants / Q000502:physiology*