Evolutionary stasis of the pseudoautosomal boundary in strepsirrhine primates
- CNRS / Univ. Lyon 1, France
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
- University of Vienna, Austria
- Zoo de Lyon, France
- CNRS / Univ. Toulouse, France
Abstract
Sex chromosomes are typically comprised of a non-recombining region and a recombining pseudoautosomal region. Accurately quantifying the relative size of these regions is critical for sex-chromosome biology both from a functional and evolutionary perspective. The evolution of the pseudoautosomal boundary (PAB) is well documented in haplorrhines (apes and monkeys) but not in strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises). Here we studied the PAB of seven species representing the main strepsirrhine lineages by sequencing a male and a female genome in each species and using sex differences in coverage to identify the PAB. We found that during primate evolution, the PAB has remained unchanged in strepsirrhines whereas several recombination suppression events moved the PAB and shortened the pseudoautosomal region in haplorrhines. Strepsirrhines are well known to have much lower sexual dimorphism than haplorrhines. We suggest that mutations with antagonistic effects between males and females have driven recombination suppression and PAB evolution in haplorrhines.
Data availability
All the data generated in this study is available at NCBI (project # PRJNA482296)
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Strepsirrhini Raw sequence readsNCBI Bioproject, PRJNA482296.
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Genome sequencing of Otolemur garnettiiENA Project, PRJNA16955.
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Microcebus murinus RefSeq GenomeNCBI bioproject, PRJNA285159.
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Otolemur garnettii RefSeq GenomeNCBI bioproject, PRJNA169348.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-‐12-‐ BSV7-‐0002-‐04)
- Gabriel AB Marais
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Shearn et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Evolutionary stasis of the pseudoautosomal boundary in strepsirrhine primates
eLife 9:e63650.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.63650
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