date:Sep 21, 2018
Polyploidy is an abrupt evolutionary event that produces thousands of extra copies of genes overnight, says senior author Xiyin Wang, an agricultural plant scientist at the North China University of Science and Technology. These extra copies may greatly elevate the robustness of the plant, providing opportunities for natural selection to prune and rewire its biological system over time.
To discover traces of polyploidy events, the researchers compared the kiwi genome to the well-characterized c