Organization, function and evolution of marsupial Y chromosomes

人类和其他哺乳动物的Y染色体只包含几个基因，大多数是专用于雄性和生殖的。90年来，人们一直在争论Y染色体是如何进化成如此特殊的。它最初是一个普通的染色体，但已经退化，直到几乎什么都没有留下，它很可能在大约1300万年后消失。对远亲哺乳动物的Y染色体进行分子表征可以用来“重新播放进化磁带”，但Y染色体被排除在全基因组测序之外，因为它很难有效地完成。我们开发了一种新的技术来分离三种有袋类动物的Y染色体上的DNA序列和基因，这三种有袋类动物特别有价值，因为它们与人类和老鼠有很大的不同。

The Y chromosome of humans and other mammals contains only a few genes, most specialized for male sex and reproduction. How the Y chromosome evolved to be so peculiar has been debated for 90 years. It began as an ordinary chromosome, but has degraded until there is almost nothing left, and it is likely to disappear in about 13 million years. Molecular characterization of the Y chromosomes of distantly related mammals could serve to 're-run the evolutionary tape', but the Y chromosome has been left out of whole genome sequencing because it is hard to do efficiently. We developed a novel technique to isolate DNA sequences and genes on the Y chromosome in three species of marsupials, which are especially valuable because they are so different from human and mouse.