Separate sexes and sex chromosomes in plants

About 15.000 flowering plants have male and female individuals (separate sexes, also called dioecy). In some of them, sex determination is achieved by sex chromosomes. Only a few plant sex chromosome systems have been studied in details, and for the vast majority of the dioecious plants (>95%), we have no data on sex determination. Sex chromosomes are notoriously difficult to study using standard genomic approaches. My talk will describe non-standard methods developed by our group, the application to several dioecious plants, both wild and cultivated, and the findings that we made.