The evolution of sex chromosome dosage compensation in animals

• 作者: Jiabi Chen Menghan Wang Xionglei He Jian-Rong Yang Xiaoshu Chen
• 来源期刊: 遗传学报
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（11）
• 所属期刊栏目: Original Research
• 页码范围: 681-693
• 页数: 13页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

The evolution of heteromorphic sex chromosomes shall lead to gene expression dosage problems,as in at least one of the sexes,the sex-linked gene dose has been reduced by half.It has been proposed that the transcriptional output of the whole X or Z chromosome should be doubled for complete dosage compensation in heterogametic sex.However,owing to the variability of the existing methods to determine the transcriptional differences between sex chromosomes and autosomes (S:A ratios) in different studies,we collected more than 500 public RNA-Seq data set from multiple tissues and species in major clades and proposed a unified computational framework for unbiased and comparable mea-surement of the S:A ratios of multiple species.We also tested the evolution of dosage compensation more directly by assessing changes in the expression levels of the current sex-linked genes relative to those of the ancestral sex-linked genes.We found that in mammals and birds,the S:A ratio is approx-imately 0.5,whereas in insects,fishes,and flatworms,the S:A ratio is approximately 1.0.Further analysis showed that the fraction of dosage-sensitive housekeeping genes on the X/Z chromosome is significantly correlated with the S:A ratio.In addition,the degree of degeneration of the Y chromosome may be responsible for the change in the S:A ratio in mammals without a dosage compensation mechanism.Our observations offer unequivocal support for the sex chromosome insensitivity hypothesis in animals and suggest that dosage sensitivity states of sex chromosomes are a major factor underlying different evolutionary strategies of dosage compensation.