Haven't had a lot of time for updates to the blog
lately. However, I have a few beetle related publications recently.
1) An article that contains a lot of my dissertation research came out
this summer in Genetics. In this paper I use the karyotypes, specifically
sex chromosome morphology, from over 1,000 beetles to make inferences about the
mode and tempo of sex-limited chromosome turnover across Coleoptera. The
results of this study inspired the "fragile Y hypothesis". This
hypothesis predicts that the characteristics of meiosis in a clade have a large
impact on the rate of Y chromosome turnover and that sexually antagonistic
selection reduces the size of the PAR (this is the region of the sex chromosome
that forms chiasmata and recombines insuring proper segregation) to such an
extent that faithful segregation becomes difficult. Beetles are an
interesting group to test these ideas in because some clades have X and Y
chromosomes that do not have a PAR and don’t come together and form chiasmata instead
the are held together at a distance by proteins. While many other species
have a more traditional meiosis where a PAR allows for chiasmata insuring
proper segregation. When we compare the
rate of Y chromosome turnover in these two groups we find that those with
distance pairing sex chromosome are less likely to lose their Y chromosome. When we look to mammals we see a replication
of this pattern suggesting that this is an important aspect of sex chromosome evolution
in many clades with heterogametic sex determination.
3) Finally I also had the opportunity to write an article for
the Ontario Entomological Society doing a review of sex chromosome and
chromosome number evolution across Coleoptera.
This was an enjoyable article to write.
I was able to talk a bit about some of the early pioneers that used
beetles to discover important aspects of basic biology in the early 1900s.
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