Coadaptation in Plant Populations

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Abstract
One of the important questions of plant breeding is whether alleles at different loci act independently or whether the population genotype is structured so that favored combinations of alleles occur more frequently than expected under randomness. Studies employing allozyme loci as markers have demonstrated that the distribution of alleles in both natural and experimental populations of inbreeding plants is closely correlated with environment on both micro- and macrogeographic scales. Multilocus analyses have also revealed the occurrence within local populations of striking gametic phase disequilibrium (linkage dis-equilibrium). These observations demonstrate that selection acts to organize the population into sets of highly interacting coadapted gene complexes that promote high fitness to the local environment.