RESEARCH ARTICLE One-Seeded Fruits in the Core Caryophyllales: Their Origin and Structural Diversity Alexander P. Sukhorukov1*, Evgeny V. Mavrodiev2, Madeleen Struwig3, Maya V. Nilova1, Khalima Kh. Dzhalilova1, Sergey A. Balandin4, Andrey Erst5¤a, Anastasiya A. Krinitsyna1 1 Department of Higher Plants, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, 2 Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America, 3 Department of Botany, University of Zululand, KwaDlangezwa 3880, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 4 Department of Geobotany, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia, 5 Herbarium, Central Siberian Botanical Garden, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia ¤a Current address: Tomsk State University, Tomsk, Russia *
[email protected] Abstract OPEN ACCESS The core Caryophyllales consist of approximately 30 families (12 000 species) distributed Citation: Sukhorukov AP, Mavrodiev EV, Struwig M, worldwide. Many members evolved one-seeded or conjoined fruits, but their origin and Nilova MV, Dzhalilova KK, Balandin SA, et al. (2015) structural diversity have not been investigated. A comparative anatomical investigation of One-Seeded Fruits in the Core Caryophyllales: Their the one-seeded fruits within the core Caryophyllales was conducted. The origin of the one- Origin and Structural Diversity. PLoS ONE 10(2): e0117974. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117974 seeded fruits and the evolutionary reconstructions of some carpological characters were traced using a tree based on rbcl and matK data in order to understand the ancestral char- Academic Editor: Wei Wang, Henan Agricultural Univerisity, CHINA acters and their changes. The one-seeded fruit type is inferred to be an ancestral character state in core Caryophyllales, with a subsequent increase in the seed number seen in all Received: October 28, 2014 major clades.