nicotralab/chen-et-al-sex-determination: v1.0.0

Project Abstract:

Sex determination occurs across animal species, but most of our knowledge about the mechanisms of sex determination comes from only a handful of bilaterian taxa. This limits our ability to infer the evolutionary history of sex determination within animals. In this study, we generated a linkage map of the genome of the colonial cnidarian Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus and used this map to determine that this species has an XX/XY sex determination system. We delineate the pseudoautosomal and non-recombining regions of the Y chromosome and show that the latter encodes a number of genes with male gonad-specific expression. These findings establish Hydractinia as a tractable non-bilaterian model system for the study of sex determination. 

This is an archive of the GitHub repo nicotralab/chen-et-al-sex-determination, which contains supplemental data files and custom scripts for "XY sex determination in a cnidarian" by Chen et. al. The manuscript will be submitted to bioRxiv.