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Updated: Jul 2, 2026

Manipulation of Ploidy in Caenorhabditis elegans
Published on: March 15, 2018
Evolutionary steps of sex chromosomes are reflected in retrogenes
1Smurfit Institute of Genetics, University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. aoife.mclysaght@tcd.ie
Abstract:
It has been shown that selective pressure to compensate for the silencing of the sex chromosomes during male meiosis resulted in many X-linked genes being duplicated as functional retrogenes on autosomes. The silencing of male sex chromosomes was probably stratified during evolution, in accordance with their stratified diversification. Here I show that the timing of the retrocopying events is associated with the timing of the X-Y differentiation of the region of the X chromosome housing the parental copy of the gene.
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