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Science 16 June 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5780, p. 1569
DOI: 10.1126/science.312.5780.1569n
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This Week in Science
The degeneration of the Y chromosome over evolutionary time has resulted in an imbalance in gene dosage between XX females and XY males, and in females, a system of dosage compensation shuts down expression from one of the pair of X chromosomes. A central component of this system in eutherian mammals is the 17-kilobase Xist noncoding RNA. Duret et al. (p. 1653) explored how Xist may have evolved by searching for Xist homologies in a range of vertebrate species. The gene appears to be limited to eutherians, which suggests that marsupials have a different mode of X-inactivation. An alignment reveals regions of short homology between the mammalian Xist gene and two exons of the chicken protein-coding gene Lnx3, which suggest that an RNA gene has evolved from a protein-coding gene.
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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)
