Dear colleagues,

We would like to announce the upcoming Special Issue “Hybridization and Genetics of Reproductive Isolation”.

The formation and persistence of species has intrigued biologists since the pre-Darwinian era. Indeed, merging of two more or less diverged genomes may have a tremendous impact on the hybrid organism both at the genetic and phenotypic levels. On one side, hybrids may suffer from reduced fitness, which can create reproductive isolation between species. On the other side, hybridization may lead to the evolution of novel traits and the formation of new hybrid species. Current advances in sequencing technologies and bioinformatic tools have offered unprecedented possibilities to study consequences of interspecific hybridization. Nonetheless, still very little is known about proximate mechanisms that cause genetic and phenotypic changes in hybrids, ultimately translating into isolation of forming species or their emergence.
While the basis of the modifications in hybrids’ fitness has been traditionally sought in gene-to-gene interactions, it is now becoming clear that it is a multifaceted problem. It involves various issues such as incompatibilities originating through non-collinearity and/or non-homology of the merged genomes, expression deregulation owing to admixis of diverged regulatory networks including deregulation of transposable elements, altered epigenetic modifications, as well as genotype-by-environment interactions of novel hybrid forms. Contrary to classical speciation scenarios, it further appears that interspecific hybridization affects reproductive modes in hybrids in a more complex way than simply inducing hybrid sterility. For example, clonal reproduction appears to be triggered by hybridization and seems to play an important role in the establishment of reproductive isolation as well as of novel hybrid and polyploid lineages.

The announced issue therefore welcomes all contributions that shed light on genetic underpinnings of hybrid phenotypes and particularly causal mechanisms of decreased hybrids’ fitness and evolution of reproductive isolation between emerging species. We invite original articles presenting novel discoveries but welcome, in particular, review and opinion-type articles presenting novel syntheses and insights into the problematics.

Dr. Karel Janko
Dr. Radka Reifová
Dr. Peter Mikulíček
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• speciation
• hybridization
• polyploidy
• gametogenesis
• reproductive isolation
• hybrid sterility
• hybrid asexuality
• gene regulatory networks
• epigenetics
• chromosome synapsis
• genotype-by-environment interaction