Heritibility of Flowering Time After One Generation of Assortative Mating in Brassca Rapa

HERITIBILITY OF FLOWERING TIME AFTER ONE GENERATION OF ASSORTATIVE MATING IN BRASSCA RAPA Kevin Musser Department of Ecology and Evolution Dr. Arthur Weis

Assortative mating, the process of like mating with like, is very common within plant populations and can lead to rapid changes in evolution and, subsequently, speciation. It is important to better understand how assortative mating occurs and affects organisms, because as the earth’s climate changes, we need to know what kind of effect it will have on the world around us. We wish to quantify how assortative mating affects the heritability of flowering time in Brassica rapa, wild mustard, by measuring the flowering times of three separate mating treatments: random, natural, and hyper assortative. We found a significant difference in the means of flowering times for the natural versus random plants and the hyper treatment versus the random treatment; however, there was no significant difference between the other flowering times of the various treatments. The variance of the hyper treated plants is expected to rise once the plants have finished flowering, making the discrepancy between the random treatment and the hypers even larger.