X Chromosome May Leave a Mark On Male Fertility 124
sciencehabit writes "Behind every great man, the saying goes, there's a great woman. And behind every sperm, there may be an X chromosome gene. In humans, the Y chromosome makes men, men, or so researchers have thought: It contains genes that are responsible for sex determination, male development, and male fertility. But now a team has discovered that X—'the female chromosome'—could also play a significant role in maleness. It contains scores of genes that are active only in tissue destined to become sperm. The finding shakes up our ideas about how sex chromosomes influence gender and also suggests that at least some parts of the X chromosome are playing an unexpectedly dynamic role in evolution."
Re:So we are part... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's just bad science journalism. The X chromosome is, for the most part, just another part of the genome; it contains all sorts of random junk, like blood clotting factors and parts of the receptors in our eyes that let us see colour. Any disease you've ever heard of that's "X-linked" or more common in men than women is either affected or effected, directly or indirectly, by the X chromosome. It is of no significance or note whatsoever that it contains stuff that's only activated in the male body.
If you want something weird and sex-linked to rant insanely about, however, there's always the mystery of digit ratio [wikipedia.org].
Re:Y chromosome is likely to stick around. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah... I heard this a few decades ago in grade school and I thought "WTF? Just about every organism on earth has two genders including things like plants. How can they say that the Y chromosome is going away?"
To be fair, the Y-chromosome isn't the only way of determining gender, and the Y-chromosome of non-mammalian species has no common ancestor to those of mammals (they all degenerated long after splitting off).
Some species use the number of X chromosomes. Reptiles and avians use ZW chromosomes, where the "female chromosome" is the shorter, degenerate one. Ants and bees are just kind of weird. [wikipedia.org] The platypus has something like 10 sex chromosomes and lacks the SRY gene, so we have no idea how it really works AFAIK, and platyfish (unrelated) have some sort of weird W/X/Y system.
Single gender in plants is relatively rare, and I have no idea how it works.
Unfortunately, my WTF moments concerning these "scientific conclusions" haven't stopped. It's only gotten more frequent as I've matured.
I think that's more of a problem with bad science journalism than bad science, though.