Topic
Dosage compensation
About: Dosage compensation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1920 publications have been published within this topic receiving 124589 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
More filters
TL;DR: This review discusses recent advances in understanding of how inactivation works, as well as the causes and clinical implications of deviations from random inactivation.
Abstract: X chromosome (X) inactivation is a remarkable biological process including the choice and cis-limited inactivation of one X, as well as the stable maintenance of this silencing by epigenetic chromatin alterations. The process results in females generally being mosaic for two populations of cells--one with each parental X active. In this review, we discuss recent advances in our understanding of how inactivation works, as well as the causes and clinical implications of deviations from random inactivation.
132 citations
TL;DR: In the house fly, Sex-lethal is not involved in sex determination, and dosage compensation, if existent at all, is not coupled with sexual differentiation, which allows for more adaptive plasticity in the housefly system.
Abstract: The genetic cascades regulating sex determination of the housefly, Musca domestica, and the fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, appear strikingly different. The bifunctional switch gene doublesex, however, is present at the bottom of the regulatory cascades of both species, and so is transformer-2, one of the genetic elements required for the sex-specific regulation of doublesex. The upstream regulators are different: Drosophila utilizes Sex-lethal to coordinate the control of sex determination and dosage compensation, i.e., the process that equilibrates the difference of two X chromosomes in females versus one X chromosome in males. In the housefly, Sex-lethal is not involved in sex determination, and dosage compensation, if existent at all, is not coupled with sexual differentiation. This allows for more adaptive plasticity in the housefly system. Accordingly, natural housefly populations can vary greatly in their mechanism of sex determination, and new types can be generated in the laboratory.
132 citations
TL;DR: The discovery of a long noncoding RNA, XACT, that is expressed from and coats the active X chromosome specifically in human pluripotent cells, suggesting a unique role for XACT in the control of human XCI initiation.
Abstract: X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) in mammals relies on XIST, a long noncoding transcript that coats and silences the X chromosome in cis. Here we report the discovery of a long noncoding RNA, XACT, that is expressed from and coats the active X chromosome specifically in human pluripotent cells. In the absence of XIST, XACT is expressed from both X chromosomes in humans but not in mice, suggesting a unique role for XACT in the control of human XCI initiation.
132 citations
TL;DR: It is reported that the cytoplasmic isozyme of aconitase is Z-linked in the guinea fowl and probably Z- linked in the domestic fowl, house sparrow and two species of cockatoos, thereby providing evidence for Z-chromosome homology in birds.
Abstract: In birds, the female is the heterogametic sex and the sex-determining system is referred to as ZZ/ZW. In mammals the male is heterogametic, and the sex-determining system is referred to as XX/XY. The mammalian X chromosome appears to have been conserved largely intact during evolution. Thus the structural gene loci for glucose-6-phosphate de-hydrogenase, phosphoglycerate kinase, α-galactosidase and hypoxanthine–guanine phosphoribosyltransferase are situated on the X chromosome of a wide variety of mammals. In addition, mammals show ‘dosage compensation’; that is, although females possess two doses of each X-linked gene while males possess only one, females produce the same level of gene product as males. In birds, cytological studies and data on sex-linked morphological mutants suggest that1 the Z chromosomes of all birds are homologous, and that buds do not show dosage compensation for sex-linked genes. Ultimate proof of these hypotheses requires the discovery of proteins whose structural gene loci are encoded by the Z chromosome of birds1, none of which has previously been found. Here we report that the cytoplasmic isozyme of aconitase is Z-linked in the guinea fowl and probably Z-linked in the domestic fowl, house sparrow and two species of cockatoos, thereby providing evidence for Z-chromosome homology in birds. We also show that there is an apparent lack of dosage compensation for cytoplasmic aconitase in the domestic fowl, house sparrow and spotted turtledove.
132 citations
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that condensin subunits in C. elegans form three complexes, one that functions in dosage compensation and two that function in mitosis and meiosis, illustrating the versatility of condensins to function in both gene regulation and chromosome segregation.
132 citations