Ploidy frequencies in plants with ploidy heterogeneity: fitting a general gametic model to empirical population data

Genome duplication (polyploidy) is a recurrent evolutionary process in plants, often conferring instant reproductive isolation and thus potentially leading to speciation. Outcome of the process is often seen in the field as different cytotypes co-occur in many plant populations. Failure of meiotic reduction during gametogenesis is widely acknowledged to be the main mode of polyploid formation. To get insight into its role in the dynamics of polyploidy generation under natural conditions, and coexistence of several ploidy levels, we developed a general gametic model for diploid-polyploid systems. This model predicts equilibrium ploidy frequencies as functions of several parameters, namely the unreduced gamete proportions and fertilities of higher ploidy plants. We used data on field ploidy frequencies for 39 presumably autopolyploid plant species/populations to infer numerical values of the model parameters (either analytically or using an optimization procedure). With the exception of a few species, the model fit was very high. The estimated proportions of unreduced gametes (median of 0.0089) matched published estimates well. Our results imply that conditions for cytotype coexistence in natural populations are likely to be less restrictive than previously assumed. In addition, rather simple models show sufficiently rich behaviour to explain the prevalence of polyploids among flowering plants.