Selected Grantee Publications

A Frog with Three Sex Chromosomes that Co-Mingle Together in Nature: Xenopus tropicalis Has a Degenerate W and a Y that Evolved from a Z Chromosome

Furman et al., PLOS Genetics. 2020.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33166278/

Genetic systems governing sexual differentiation vary among species. Furman et al. investigated a frog with three sex chromosomes, the Western clawed frog, Xenopus tropicalis. They demonstrate that natural populations from the western and eastern edges of Ghana have a young Y chromosome, and that a male-determining factor on this Y chromosome is in a similar genomic location as a previously known female-determining factor on the W chromosome. Their findings are consistent with theoretical expectations associated with recombination suppression on sex chromosomes and demonstrate that several characteristics of old and established sex chromosomes can arise well before they become cytogenetically distinguished. Supported by ORIP (P40OD010997) and NICHD.