The firing of CBS CEO Les Moonves for his alleged history of revolting attacks on women and the upcoming one-year anniversary of Ronan Farrow’s seminal New Yorker piece on Harvey Weinstein and of Alyssa Milano’s #MeToo tweet echoing Tarana Burke’s 2006 call-to-action, got me pondering the Y chromosome.
Genomically speaking, the diminutive Y is the only thing that distinguishes males from females (see “Y Envy"). Both sexes have X chromosomes, and although mitochondrial DNA passes from females to all offspring, we all have mitochondria. Only the Y is the male’s alone.
If size matters, the Y chromosome loses. The human X has about 1500 protein-encoding genes compared to the Y’s 231, some of which have counterparts on the X. Only a handful of Y genes, in the “male-specific region” of the chromosome, are uniquely male. They include the SRY gene that determines maleness and a few others that control fertility.
So the Y chromosome can tell us some interesting things about the male of the species.
To continue reading go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.
Genomically speaking, the diminutive Y is the only thing that distinguishes males from females (see “Y Envy"). Both sexes have X chromosomes, and although mitochondrial DNA passes from females to all offspring, we all have mitochondria. Only the Y is the male’s alone.
If size matters, the Y chromosome loses. The human X has about 1500 protein-encoding genes compared to the Y’s 231, some of which have counterparts on the X. Only a handful of Y genes, in the “male-specific region” of the chromosome, are uniquely male. They include the SRY gene that determines maleness and a few others that control fertility.
So the Y chromosome can tell us some interesting things about the male of the species.
To continue reading go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.