Subgenome assignment in allopolyploids: challenges and future directions

Whole genome duplications (WGDs), also known as polyploid events, have played a crucial role in the evolutionary success of angiosperms across recent and ancient timescales. A recurrent observation from the analysis of allopolyploids is that one of the parental subgenomes is generally more dominant, referred to as ‘subgenome dominance’, based on higher gene content and expression patterns. Subgenome dominance has far reaching implications to research areas ranging from crop improvement efforts to evolutionary and ecological studies. However, the analysis of subgenome dominance in more ancient polyploids is complicated by a long history of homoeologous exchanges among subgenomes. Here, we will discuss how resulting homoeolog rearrangements and replacements have been ignored in previous studies and urge future studies to integrate phylogenetic approaches to assign homoeologs to parental subgenomes.