Schistosome W-Linked Genes Inform Temporal Dynamics of Sex Chromosome Evolution and Suggest Candidate for Sex Determination.

ABSTRACT: Schistosomes, the human parasites responsible for snail fever, are female-heterogametic. Different parts of their ZW sex chromosomes have stopped recombining in distinct lineages, creating "evolutionary strata" of various ages. Although the Z-chromosome is well characterized at the genomic and molecular level, the W-chromosome has remained largely unstudied from an evolutionary perspective, as only a few W-linked genes have been detected outside of the model species Schistosoma mansoni. Here, we characterize the gene content and evolution of the W-chromosomes of S. mansoni and of the divergent species S. japonicum. We use a combined RNA/DNA k-mer based pipeline to assemble around 100 candidate W-specific transcripts in each of the species. About half of them map to known protein coding gen

SUBMITTER: Elkrewi M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8662593 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature