The Blood is the Life: 14-7-2011

[miss_s_b]

• Why women writers and stories about females are taken less seriously
  (tags: feminism film)

Comments

[telegramsam]

I find this phenomenon particularly hilarious (i.e. depressing), given that even for some mammals with a Y-chromosome, if one tiny bit of that chromosome is damaged or missing or something else disrputs the expression of certain genes on said chromosome during development, the fetus may very well end up phenotypically female because that's the "default setting" for a mammalian fetus...

[bagpuss]

yet that one little bit of Y (SRY if you are interested) attached to any other chromosome and the mammal is male regardless of the presence of Y or not aint genetics weird

[telegramsam]

True, unless you're dealing with some other mitigating factor (androgen insensitivity, etc).

Which all just proves that even biological sex isn't nearly as cut-and-dried as people assume anyway.

[bagpuss]

Both fortunately and unfortunately biology is rarely simple, makes for lots of interesting research but does it make it all rather difficult

[telegramsam]

Platypuses have 10 sex chromosomes, rather than two. :D

[bagpuss]

Yep but they are also more closely related to the Bird WZ system then the Mammal XY, it would appear our XY system arose from autosomes after we diverged from the monotremes. I think there are bits of X which are syntenic with chr6 in Playtpus

[telegramsam]

Supposedly one end of the chain is like the mammalian XY system and the other end is more like the WZ system.

Platypuses are awesome.

[bagpuss]

but a complete bugger to annotate being so far away from any of the evidence

[bagpuss]

Though if you are interesting in reading the genome paper do let me know