Purifying Selection Maintains Dosage-Sensitive Genes during Degeneration of the Threespine Stickleback Y Chromosome.

ABSTRACT: Sex chromosomes are subject to unique evolutionary forces that cause suppression of recombination, leading to sequence degeneration and the formation of heteromorphic chromosome pairs (i.e., XY or ZW). Although progress has been made in characterizing the outcomes of these evolutionary processes on vertebrate sex chromosomes, it is still unclear how recombination suppression and sequence divergence typically occur and how gene dosage imbalances are resolved in the heterogametic sex. The threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) is a powerful model system to explore vertebrate sex chromosome evolution, as it possesses an XY sex chromosome pair at relatively early stages of differentiation. Using a combination of whole-genome and transcriptome sequencing, we characterized sequence

SUBMITTER: White MA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4635650 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature