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Simon J. Hiscock, Sexual Plant Reproduction, Annals of Botany, Volume 108, Issue 4, September 2011, Pages 585–587, https://doi.org/10.1093/aob/mcr217
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Flowering plants are the most successful group of land plants, containing over 90 % of species and dominating almost every terrestrial ecosystem. This evolutionary success is due, in part, to their sophisticated reproductive biology centred on the eponymous flower, where female gametophytes are hidden and protected by the sporophyte carpel/pistil, animals are the principal transport vectors of the sperm-containing male gametophytes (pollen), and fertilization no longer requires water on account of the pollen tube. This combination of reproductive traits has permitted the evolution of an extraordinary array of mating and pollination systems that we are only just beginning to understand.
At a time of unprecedented human population expansion and biodiversity loss, research on plant reproduction, with its potential to help increase crop yields and deliver food security, and to guide effective conservation strategies, has never been more important. This Special Issue collates a diverse set of reviews and papers that span the breadth of current research on the reproductive biology of angiosperms, from the evolutionary development of the flower, the genetics and cell biology of pollen–pistil recognition and fertilization, to the emerging discipline of ecological and evolutionary systems biology.
