Learning from rejection: the evolutionary biology of single-locus incompatibility

The self-incompatibility (S-) locus of flowering plants is among the most polymorphic known. PCR methods can now be used to estimate both the number of alleles in natural populations and their sequence diversity. The number of alleles provides an estimate of recent effective population size, thus the S-locus provides a tool for examining how species characteristics affect population size. Sequence relationships among alleles provide another estimate of population size extending millions of years into the past. Relationships between S-alleles and related genes provide a means of dating the age of origin of incompatibility systems and determining which, if any, angiosperm families share incompatibility by homology.