• ...xericensis) [3,4]. Prior to the Anglo-American settlement, big sagebrush was estimated to occupy up to 100 million ha of the western United States, while contemporary estimates have shown that the area has been reduced to...
• ...tridentata and vaseyana also include tetraploid populations [4]...
• ...McArthur and Sanderson [4] suggest that hybrid zones could be repositories of genetic variation and gene exchange, and can influence the evolution of big sagebrush...
• ...Exploring the inter-subspecies hybridization hypothesis Hybridization can be of great importance to the ecological adaptation and subsequent evolution of offspring because of the novel genetic recombination and spatial selection [38-40]...

Prabin Bajgain, et al. Transcriptome characterization and polymorphism detection between subs...

• ... hybridisation is especially interesting for evolutionary biologists because it provides insights into the genetic and ecological basis of species (Rieseberg et al. 1999; Coyne and Orr 2004; Orr 2005; Moccia et al. 2007) and may create an extensive array of genotypes in which parental co-adapted gene combinations are broken up, combined anew and subjected to the process of natural selection (Anderson 1949; Rieseberg and Wendel 1993; Arnold ...
• ... about what determines the ecological performance and the evolutionary fate of hybrid genotypes, one may gain further insight into the importance of morphological, physiological or phytochemical features that contribute to the reproductive isolation among parental species and to fitness differences among them in a particular environment with its numerous abiotic and biotic factors (Anderson 1948; Endler 1977; Barton and Hewitt 1985; Arnold ...
• ...Therefore, the situation in the S. germanicus - S. ovatus hybrid system presented here is very similar to the pattern of variation observed by Arnold (1997) in the Louisiana irises Iris fulva and I. hexagona, where formation of F1s is a very rare event (none survive in nature, although F1s can be readily made artificially), but the rare F1s serve to produce backcross hybrids that have high fitness and are common in some habitats...