{"id":21718,"date":"2025-02-06T18:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-02-06T19:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21718"},"modified":"2025-02-06T19:30:57","modified_gmt":"2025-02-06T19:30:57","slug":"what-lurks-in-this-flowers-bizarrely-large-y-chromosome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=21718","title":{"rendered":"What Lurks in This Flower\u2019s Bizarrely Large Y Chromosome?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Scientists published a full genetic sequence of the genes that make some white campions male, and hope their work could unlock how the flower got that way.<\/p>\n

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The vast majority of plants are hermaphrodites, with both male and female reproductive parts. Oaks<\/a>, some orchids<\/a>, the potted spider plant in your office \u2014 they\u2019re all capable of reproducing without a member of another sex nearby.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt makes sense if you are an organism that can\u2019t run around and find mates,\u201d said Deborah Charlesworth, a population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh who has studied the reproductive strategies of plants for decades.<\/p>\n

But some plants have taken a different approach. They have evolved sex chromosomes, the bits of DNA that make individual plants either male or female. In that club are organisms like the ginkgo, whose females produce stinky fruits, while males are stink-free. Or consider the asparagus, whose females produce red berries and thinner stalks than males.<\/p>\n

Some of these species are stranger yet: Their sex chromosomes are bizarrely outsized. The diminutive white campion plant, for instance, packs a Y chromosome that is bigger than the entire genome of the puffer fish<\/a> or that of the fruit fly<\/a>. In the journal Science on Thursday, collaborating researchers, including Dr. Charlesworth, have published a full sequence<\/a> of the white campion\u2019s beefy Y chromosome, allowing a closer look at its contents and evolutionary history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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DNA sequencing is commonplace these days. But in the 1990s, when fast sequencing technology was new and fueling a revolution in biology, scientists could not use it effectively on the Y chromosomes of plants, said Gabriel Marais, a biologist at Universit\u00e9 Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France and a senior author of the new paper.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the techniques used to sequence the rest of the genome do not work well on Y chromosomes, which tend to have many of the same sequences repeated over and over. Slicing up the Y chromosome, sequencing the fragments and trying to piece them together like a puzzle \u2014 which works so well with the rest of the genome \u2014 yields so many identical pieces that it is impossible to assemble the larger picture.<\/p>\n

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Scientists published a full genetic sequence of the genes that make some white campions male, and hope their work could unlock how the flower got that way.The vast majority of plants are hermaphrodites, with both male and female reproductive parts. Oaks, some orchids, the potted spider plant in your office \u2014 they\u2019re all capable of reproducing without a member of another sex nearby.\u201cIt makes sense if you are an organism that can\u2019t run around and find mates,\u201d said Deborah Charlesworth, a population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh who has studied the reproductive strategies of plants for decades.But some plants have taken a different approach. They have evolved sex chromosomes, the bits of DNA that make individual plants either male or female. In that club are organisms like the ginkgo, whose females produce stinky fruits, while males are stink-free. Or consider the asparagus, whose females produce red berries and thinner stalks than males.Some of these species are stranger yet: Their sex chromosomes are bizarrely outsized. The diminutive white campion plant, for instance, packs a Y chromosome that is bigger than the entire genome of the puffer fish or that of the fruit fly. In the journal Science on Thursday, collaborating researchers, including Dr. Charlesworth, have published a full sequence of the white campion\u2019s beefy Y chromosome, allowing a closer look at its contents and evolutionary history.DNA sequencing is commonplace these days. But in the 1990s, when fast sequencing technology was new and fueling a revolution in biology, scientists could not use it effectively on the Y chromosomes of plants, said Gabriel Marais, a biologist at Universit\u00e9 Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France and a senior author of the new paper.That\u2019s because the techniques used to sequence the rest of the genome do not work well on Y chromosomes, which tend to have many of the same sequences repeated over and over. Slicing up the Y chromosome, sequencing the fragments and trying to piece them together like a puzzle \u2014 which works so well with the rest of the genome \u2014 yields so many identical pieces that it is impossible to assemble the larger picture.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21720,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21718"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21721,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21718\/revisions\/21721"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}