New Understanding Of Genetic Basis Of Sex Determination

Biologists from the University of Maryland writing in Science have described the genetic basis for two co-existing systems of sexual determination in cichlid fish from Lake Malawi and, in doing so, identified a mechanism by which new sex chromosomes may evolve. In nearly all mammals, the SRY gene determines the sex of offspring and is located on the Y chromosome, which is much smaller than the X chromosome but in many other animal groups the genetic mechanism of sex determination evolves quite rapidly and the differences between sex chromosomes are harder to observe. read more

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