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

3.5 Billion years of hacks

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when you have 3.5 Billion years of hacks. Legacy code, no overall architecture and absolute chaos.

Let's start over and redesign humans from the ground up.

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.

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:So we are part...

[Samantha Wright]

No, it's just bad science journalism. The X chromosome is, for the most part, just another part of the genome; it contains all sorts of random junk, like blood clotting factors and parts of the receptors in our eyes that let us see colour. Any disease you've ever heard of that's "X-linked" or more common in men than women is either affected or effected, directly or indirectly, by the X chromosome. It is of no significance or note whatsoever that it contains stuff that's only activated in the male body.

If you want something weird and sex-linked to rant insanely about, however, there's always the mystery of digit ratio.

Y chromosome is likely to stick around.

[Valdrax]

The Y chromosome is a li'l runt and they think it won't even be there anymore in a hunnert thousand years or so.

I don't think there's anyone who takes this seriously any more. There were some people suggesting that if genes are lost at a linear rate off the Y chromosome, it should disappear in another 10 million years. However, chimpanzees and humans show no difference in the number of genes on the Y chromosome since we diverged 6-7 million years ago, and we've both only lost one gene since we diverged from the rhesus macaque 25 mya. Given that sequencing of the platypus genome puts the common mammalian Y chromosome at a max of age of 166 mya, this suggests the linear model is just wrong.

The Wikipedia has good article on this from which I drew my numbers, if you're interested in more.

You didn't finish it...

[Rob_Bryerton]

You didn't finish that saying. Time to burn some karma.

"Behind every great man, the saying goes, there's a great woman.

And behind every great woman, there's a man. Staring at her ass.

Re:There is _female_ in male? Sacrilege!

[Anonymous Coward]

>> domestic violence
SIGNIFICANTLY more males than females are assaulted and killed in society every day.
Perhaps not by their partner, but overall in society.

>> education access
Girls have been outperforming boys in school for many years now.
Also for many years, many more girls have been going into higher education than boys.

>> maternal mortality
Don't even get me started on government health spending.
Women live longer than men, but significantly more is spent on female-specific health issues.

No, what most (not all, but most) feminists do is perpetuate the notion of victimhood amongst females, and most women swallow this hook, line and sinker.
But if you do the research -- I mean actually look at the numbers -- you'll see that males cop it far worse than females.

Re:So we are part...

[Samantha Wright]

There's nothing wrong here; it's just a simple misunderstanding by the journalist. We've known about X-linked for as long we've known about sex chromosomes, which inherently implies that the X chromosome has responsibilities beyond determining sex.

Believe it or not, however, there are actually advantages to the Y chromosome being so minimal. Men are nature's beta testers: sometimes mutations in the X chromosome have significant benefits, and as these traits aren't balanced out by a second allele, they become more pronounced and hence are easier to detect during sexual and natural selection. This is (probably) why men display a greater variance in height, strength, and analytical skill. Similarly, by always suffering from a disease, and hence by not getting laid, men protect the rest of the tribe from the disorders they end up with. (Admittedly not great when you're actually in the middle of things, but sexual dimorphism and reproduction are both full of cruelties.)