Round the outer ring are shown the 23 chromosomes of the human genome. The lines in blue, in the third ring, show internal rearrangements, in which a stretch of DNA has been moved from one site to another within the same chromosome. The red lines, in the bull's eye, designate switches of DNA from one chromosome to another.
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Sex chromosomes are cool. Because they're cool, I've written about them before. It's cool to trace the origins of sex chromosomes. It's cool to study how they evolve.
A few weeks ago PNAS published a paper on the evolution of snake sex chromosomes. The authors compare snake sex chromosome evolution with that of mammals and birds.
Our genes are arrayed along 23 pairs of chromosomes. On rare occasion, a mutation can change their order. If we picture the genes on a chromosome as
A few months ago I wrote the following:
Wow! Are we lookly at mostly random rearrangements, or does all this flipping proceed according to a program?