Getting a Full Dose? Reconsidering Sex Chromosome Dosage Compensation in the Silkworm, Bombyx mori
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Issue Date
2011-04-20Author
Walters, James R.
Hardcastle, Thomas J.
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Rights
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Show full item recordAbstract
Dosage compensation—equalizing gene expression levels in response to differences in gene dose or copy number—is classically considered to play a critical role in the evolution of heteromorphic sex chromosomes. As the X and Y diverge through degradation and gene loss on the Y (or the W in female-heterogametic ZW taxa), it is expected that dosage compensation will evolve to correct for sex-specific differences in gene dose. Although this is observed in some organisms, recent genome-wide expression studies in other taxa have revealed striking exceptions. In particular, reports that both birds and the silkworm moth (Bombyx mori) lack dosage compensation have spurred speculation that this is the rule for all female-heterogametic taxa. Here, we revisit the issue of dosage compensation in silkworm by replicating and extending the previous analysis. Contrary to previous reports, our efforts reveal a pattern typically associated with dosage compensated taxa: the global male:female expression ratio does not differ between the Z and autosomes. We believe the previous report of unequal male:female ratios on the Z reflects artifacts of microarray normalization in conjunction with not testing a major assumption that the male:female global expression ratio was unbiased for autosomal loci. However, we also find that the global Z chromosome expression is significantly reduced relative to autosomes, a pattern not expected in dosage compensated taxa. This combination of male:female parity with an overall reduction in expression for sex-linked loci is not consistent with the prevailing evolutionary theory of sex chromosome evolution and dosage compensation.
ISSN
1759-6653Collections
Citation
Walters, James R.; Hardcastle, Thomas J. (2011). "Getting a Full Dose? Reconsidering Sex Chromosome Dosage Compensation in the Silkworm, Bombyx mori." Genome Biology and Evolution, 3(2011):491-504. http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evr036.
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as: This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.