Naturalized plants have smaller genomes than their non-invading relatives: a flow cytometric analysis of the Czech alien flora.
Abstract
Species naturalized in the Czech Republic have significantly smaller genomes than their congeners not known to be naturalized or invasive in any part of the world. This trend is supported at the family level: alien species naturalized in the Czech flora have on average a smaller genome than is the mean value for non-invading confamilials.
Moreover, naturalized and non-invading species clearly differed in the frequency of five genome size categories; this difference was mainly due to very small genomes prevailing and intermediate to very large genomes under-represented in the former group. Our results provide the first quantitative support for association of genome size with invasiveness, based on a large set of alien species across a number of plant families.