How Flowering Plants Become Super Plants

Kara Rogers

Tomatoes, peanuts, corn, and strawberries seem to have little in common, with the exception that they are edible plants.  Yet, they share a very unique trait, one that can be seen only with the power of a microscope—they are polyploids, meaning that they possess extra sets of chromosomes in the nuclei of their cells.  Between 50 and 70 percent of the world’s flowering plants are believed to be polyploids.

The fascinating nature of polyploidy lies with the fact that many affected plants are relevant to our everyday lives.  Varieties of some commercially important plants, such as cotton and wheat, are polyploids that have arisen naturally or through cultivation.  The extra sets of chromosomes that characterize these plants become incorporated into cells most often as a result of an error in a form of cell division known as meiosis.

Cells normally contain two sets of chromosomes, a state described as diploid. The diploid chromosome number is 46 in humans, 8 in fruit flies, and 78 in both domestic dogs and chickens.  But apples can be diploid, with 34, or triploid, with 51.  And bananas can have either 22 or 33, depending on whether they are diploid or triploid.  The triploid forms are examples of polyploids.

Plants like tetraploid peanuts, hexaploid bread wheat, and octaploid strawberries add to the complexity of polyploidy.  A number of these plants are useful agriculturally because the extra genetic material enables them to grow more vigorously than their diploid cousins.  They also tend to produce unusually large fruit and flowers. 

Although some polyploids are so hardy that they possess a selective advantage over normal plants, providing accommodations for all those extra chromosomes can be a major burden.  The cells of high-level polyploids, such as strawberries, are often exceptionally large, which can result in watered-down fruit and brittle leaves or shoots.  In short, more is not always better.

Polyploids, though they stand out as exceptions to the canon of heredity, still are confined by one of nature’s most basic guiding principles—genetic variation.  Their success is closely tied to the diversity of their extra genes.  Some polyploids inherit extra chromosomes that are nearly identical in genetic content to their ancestor chromosomes, which renders them as equally susceptible to diseases and environmental factors as diploids. But others inherit extra chromosomes that differ substantially from their ancestral forms. This provides at least some degree genetic diversity, which increases their ability to stave off disease and facilitates their adaptation to environmental stress. 

Stronger when battling disease and pests. 

Polyploids are generated when chromosomes fail to segregate properly during cell division, producing eggs or sperm that are diploid, instead of the normal haploid (or half of diploid).  When an abnormal diploid cell combines with a normal haploid cell, the result is a triploid, an organism whose cells possess three sets of chromosomes.  There also are situations in which two abnormal diploid cells combine to give rise to a tetraploid, an organism whose cells have four sets of chromosomes.  Likewise, tetraploids can combine with tetraploids, producing octaploids.

As long as there exists an even number of chromosome sets, whether diploid, tetraploid, or hexaploid, an organism usually will be fertile.  However, if the chromosome number is odd, such as triploid or pentaploid, the organism tends to be sterile.  This occurs because the odd chromosome does not have a partner to pair with during cell division, leading to incomplete egg and sperm formation, which in turn causes division to terminate.

Because polyploid plants can breed with one another, they are inclined to produce new species.  In contrast to the gradual evolutionary process that underlies most speciation events, polyploidy allows new species to emerge quite suddenly. Polyploids also take advantage of their extra genes, rearranging them and shuttling some off to learn new functions, which further contributes to speciation.

Polyploidy occurs in plants that reproduce sexually or asexually, but in animals extra chromosomes appear almost exclusively in those species that undergo asexual division by parthenogenesis, such as salamanders, insects, and some fish.  Polyploidy is otherwise very rare in animals, because most reproduce sexually. This mode of reproduction in animals undermines polyploidy, readily selecting against cells containing chromosomal defects by aborting abnormal embryos.  Although it is not clear why this is the case, scientists suspect that the complexities of development in sexually reproducing animals require such genetic precision that polyploidy in any form cannot be tolerated.

Polyploidy continues to have a number of useful applications in horticulture and agriculture.  Breeding ornamental polyploid hybrids that produce sterile offspring limits the potential for invasive spread of nonnative species.  Scientists also are working to develop polyploid crops that are more tolerant to pests and environmental stress than diploids.  Making use of such a remarkable natural process is an attractive alternative to genetic modification.