Month: September 2022

AVIAN VARIANTS. “Chickens and other birds have a completely different type of sex chromosome, called Z and W, and in these lineages it is the heterogametic ZW pattern that specifies female and the homogametic ZZ the male.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

TEMPERATURE TRIGGER. “In some animals, including turtles and crocodiles, the temperature at which an egg hatches determines sexual identity and this is called Environmental Sex Determination (ESD) to distinguish it from Chromosomal Sex Determination (CSD).” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

TEMPERATURE + STRUCTURE TRIGGERS. “Yet other species appear to be hybrids of the two with features of both environmental and chromosomal sex determination.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

QUANTITATIVE TRIGGER. “Finally in some lines of the zebra fish Danio rerio sex appears to be a quantitative trait, in which genes on multiple different chromosomes come together in allelic combinations that favor either female or male fate. This quantitative sex determining system has been termed polygenic sex determination (PSD).” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

NO SINGLE WAY. “To summarize, in simple terms the ways in which sex is determined are plastic and diverse.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

THE DIVERSE KINGDOM. “What about fungi? Relatively few fungi have large size dimorphic sex chromosomes, but there are a few well studied examples such as Neurospora tetrasperma, Podospora, and Microbotryum. Most fungi have relatively smaller regions of their genome, called mating-type loci, or MAT for short, that dictate their mating type.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

LARGE KINGDOM. “There are an estimated 5 million species of fungi, and maybe more, much remains to be learned about their sexual nature. Many fungi are currently classified as asexual, and yet many fungi long thought to be asexual have been subsequently found to be sexual, or in some cases at least parasexual (i.e. C. albicans).” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

FUNGI POSTER CHILD. “The paradigmatic example is S. cerevisiae in which a relatively small region of the genome, less than a thousand base pairs, expresses in the alternate mating types one or two key cell fate determinants, all of which are transcription factors responsible for orchestrating both haploid cell type specificity (a or α) and the diploid zygote fate (a/α).” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn

Stonemason’s marks are all over Girona stone. View in LinkedIn

HUGE BELL CURVE. “But other fungi have much more exotic sex lives, and have a more complex mating-type determining system in which there are literally thousands and thousands and thousands of different mating types.” https://lnkd.in/dn4azG7 View in LinkedIn