X Chromosome May Leave a Mark On Male Fertility

sciencehabit writes "Behind every great man, the saying goes, there's a great woman. And behind every sperm, there may be an X chromosome gene. In humans, the Y chromosome makes men, men, or so researchers have thought: It contains genes that are responsible for sex determination, male development, and male fertility. But now a team has discovered that X—'the female chromosome'—could also play a significant role in maleness. It contains scores of genes that are active only in tissue destined to become sperm. The finding shakes up our ideas about how sex chromosomes influence gender and also suggests that at least some parts of the X chromosome are playing an unexpectedly dynamic role in evolution."

Comments

Moronic writer. Old news with new data.

[i kan reed]

The y chromosome doesn't code many genes at all, and this has been known for a long time. It's main function is turning specific genes off. Anatomy of all sorts, including gender characteristics is coded across all 24 chromosomes. The y just suppresses the female parts.

If I learn something over a decade ago in a high school class, it shouldn't be "science news."

Re:Who wrote this mess?

[MozeeToby]

An infinite number of monkeys and a ruthless unit testing process. As for documentation, there's lots of people working on it, but some of them think they should be able to hold exclusive rights to their documentation.

Re:3.5 Billion years of hacks

[Samantha Wright]

The Y chromosome used to just be a variant of the X chromosome, with only a few genes different; they were the same size. Over time, careless maintenance staff decided the backups were redundant and stopped keeping them. Thus something like 5% of men have one or more factory defects—most commonly colour-deficient vision, which some backward engineer decided was a feature , not a bug, and went to great lengths to distribute bad copies to other users.

On the plus side, we recently found out that the genome actually does have some documentation—well, more like debugger symbols—so it's getting easier to figure out where the important binaries are located. Unfortunately in the process we also discovered that what appeared to be severe filesystem fragmentation is actually rotational performance optimization, and most of the rest of the disk is actually a messy broth of shell scripts, not merely unallocated space as we assumed.

The sad thing is that even if we did redesign everything, it would probably be way worse than the existing codebase, particularly since we only have a tiny portion of the actual spec, which you can imagine was never exactly written down.