35
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      An abundance of X-linked genes expressed in spermatogonia.

      1 , , ,
      Nature genetics
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Spermatogonia are the self-renewing, mitotic germ cells of the testis from which sperm arise by means of the differentiation pathway known as spermatogenesis. By contrast with hematopoietic and other mammalian stem-cell populations, which have been subjects of intense molecular genetic investigation, spermatogonia have remained largely unexplored at the molecular level. Here we describe a systematic search for genes expressed in mouse spermatogonia, but not in somatic tissues. We identified 25 genes (19 of which are novel) that are expressed in only male germ cells. Of the 25 genes, 3 are Y-linked and 10 are X-linked. If these genes had been distributed randomly in the genome, one would have expected zero to two of the genes to be X-linked. Our findings indicate that the X chromosome has a predominant role in pre-meiotic stages of mammalian spermatogenesis. We hypothesize that the X chromosome acquired this prominent role in male germ-cell development as it evolved from an ordinary, unspecialized autosome.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Nat Genet
          Nature genetics
          Springer Science and Business Media LLC
          1061-4036
          1061-4036
          Apr 2001
          : 27
          : 4
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Whitehead Institute, and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
          Article
          86927
          10.1038/86927
          11279525
          469a388d-1adc-41a1-8fbe-173ff8c3c994
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article