Abstract
Interspecific hybridization in plant biology, volume IIWe continued with the Research Topic "Interspecific Hybridization in Plant Biology, Volume II" to discuss its fundamental and applied consequences.While the topic was open to salient work in other taxa, published work all addressed plants, in which such work is prominent.A critical threshold for publication was the extent to which findings are of cross-cutting interest and importance, i.e., not only to those working on the target taxon but to a wide range of biological scientists (Tao et al., 2022). Interspecific hybridization and genome dominanceInterspecific hybridization, a significant evolutionary phenomenon, involves fusing two distinct genomes, often leading to whole-genome duplication and the generation of genetic novelty that serves as raw material for selection and evolution (Carscadden et al., 2023;Deb et al., 2023).While the overwhelming majority of interspecific hybrids quickly go extinct, in rare cases this process can increase the adaptive potential of hybrid individuals through newly generated genomic diversity, but it can also induce genetic and epigenetic changes in response to genomic instability (Fang et al., 2024).Genome dominance refers to hybrids in which one parent genome becomes 'dominant' (Kan et al., 2024), as manifested by physical replacement of chromatin from the subordinate genome and/or skewed gene expression.Nucleolar dominance, the functional expression of only one parental set of ribosomal genes in hybrids, is another example of an intragenomic competitive process involving only ribosomal DNA.There is evidence that nucleolar dominance in plants is difficult to predict, independent of maternal effect or parental ribosomal DNA copy number, reversible, developmentally regulated, and Frontiers in Plant Science frontiersin.