Immune complexity: making a male (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 06, 2020, 22:06 (1296 days ago) @ David Turell

Another new study of ape genomes:

https://phys.org/news/2020-10-evolution-chromosome-great-apes-deciphered.html

"A team of biologists and computer scientists at Penn State sequenced and assembled the Y chromosome from orangutan and bonobo and compared those sequences to the existing human, chimpanzee, and gorilla Y sequences. From the comparison, the team were able to clarify patterns of evolution that seem to fit with behavioral differences between the species and reconstruct a model of what the Y chromosome might have looked like in the ancestor of all great apes.

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"The Y chromosome is unusual. It contains relatively few genes, many of which are involved in male sex determination and sperm production; large sections of repetitive DNA, short sequences repeated over and over again; and large DNA palindromes, inverted repeats that can be many thousands of letters long and read the same forwards and backwards.

"Previous work by the team comparing human, chimpanzee, and gorilla sequences had revealed some unexpected patterns. Humans are more closely related to chimpanzees, but for some characteristics, the human Y was more similar to the gorilla Y.

"'If you just compare the sequence identity—comparing the As,Ts, Cs, and Gs of the chromosomes—humans are more similar to chimpanzees, as you would expect," said Kateryna Makova, Pentz Professor of Biology at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. "But if you look at which genes are present, the types of repetitive sequences, and the shared palindromes, humans look more similar to gorillas. We needed the Y chromosome of more great ape species to tease out the details of what was going on.'"

Comment: This adds more information but nothing else.