Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Botany Volume 2012, Article ID 510478, 11 pages doi:10.1155/2012/510478 Research Article The Evolutionary Dynamics of Apomixis in Ferns: A Case Study from Polystichoid Ferns Hong-Mei Liu,1 Robert J. Dyer,2, 3 Zhi-You Guo,4 Zhen Meng,5 Jian-Hui Li,5 and Harald Schneider2, 6 1 Key Laboratory of Southern Subtropical Plant Diversity, Fairylake Botanical Garden, Shenzhen & Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518004, China 2 Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD, UK 3 Research Group in Biodiversity Genomics and Environmental Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Ascot, Berkshire SL5 7PY, UK 4 Department of Biological Sciences, Qiannan Normal College for Nationalities, Duyun 558000, China 5 Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China 6 State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China Correspondence should be addressed to Hong-Mei Liu,
[email protected] and Harald Schneider,
[email protected] Received 19 July 2012; Revised 20 September 2012; Accepted 20 September 2012 Academic Editor: Karl Joseph Niklas Copyright © 2012 Hong-Mei Liu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The disparate distribution of apomixis between the major plant lineages is arguably one of the most paradoxical phenomena in plant evolution. Ferns are particularly interesting for addressing this issue because apomixis is more frequent than in any other group of plants.