The human Y chromosome, responsible for determining male sex, has finally undergone a comprehensive examination.
The Y chromosome is the smallest of the human chromosomes. ”In the old time, people thought that it’s just a junkyard for human genomic material, and it only serves one purpose … to determine male sex,” says Yun-Fai Chris Lau, a human geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work. Like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, the Y chromosome gets no respect, he says.
But it’s clear that the Y does more than determining male sex, Lau says. Some males lose the Y chromosome from some of their cells. The loss puts them at risk for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other illnesses (SN: 10/26/14). Having a truly complete reference Y chromosome will allow researchers to better understand the role the chromosome plays in the body, he says.
Though small, the Y chromosome has intimidated many researchers because it has so many repetitive bits of DNA, says Adam Phillippy, a bioinformatics researcher at the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Md., who led the project.
2023-08-23 10:00:00
Original from www.sciencenews.org