How low can you go? Introducing SeXY: sex identification from low-quantity sequencing data despite lacking assembled sex chromosomes.

ABSTRACT: Accurate sex identification is crucial for elucidating the biology of a species. In the absence of directly observable sexual characteristics, sex identification of wild fauna can be challenging, if not impossible. Molecular sexing offers a powerful alternative to morphological sexing approaches. Here, we present SeXY, a novel sex-identification pipeline, for very low-coverage shotgun sequencing data from a single individual. SeXY was designed to utilize low-effort screening data for sex identification and does not require a conspecific sex-chromosome assembly as reference. We assess the accuracy of our pipeline to data quantity by downsampling sequencing data from 100,000 to 1000 mapped reads and to reference genome selection by mapping to a variety of reference genomes of various qualiti

SUBMITTER: Cabrera AA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9405501 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature