LEARNING MORE about the Y chromosome.

While the X chromosome has remained large throughout evolution, with about 2000 genes, the Y chromosome lost most of its genetic material early in its evolution; it now retains less than 100 of those original genes. That’s led some scientists to hypothesize that the chromosome is largely indispensable and could shrink away entirely.

To determine which Y chromosome genes are shared across species, Daniel Winston Bellott, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and colleagues compared the Y chromosomes of eight mammals, including humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, mice, rats, bulls, and opossums. The overlap, they found, wasn’t just in those genes known to determine the sex of an embryo. Eighteen diverse genes stood out as being highly similar between the species. The genes had broad functions including controlling the expression of genes in many other areas of the genome. The fact that all the species have retained these genes, despite massive changes to the overall Y chromosome, hints that they’re vital to mammalian survival.