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. 2021 Aug;231(4):1599-1611.
doi: 10.1111/nph.17456. Epub 2021 Jun 16.

Plant genera Cannabis and Humulus share the same pair of well-differentiated sex chromosomes

Djivan Prentout  1 , Natasa Stajner  2 , Andreja Cerenak  3 , Theo Tricou  1 , Celine Brochier-Armanet  1 , Jernej Jakse  2 , Jos Käfer  1 , Gabriel A B Marais  1   4
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Free article

Plant genera Cannabis and Humulus share the same pair of well-differentiated sex chromosomes

Djivan Prentout et al. New Phytol. 2021 Aug.
Free article

Abstract

We recently described, in Cannabis sativa, the oldest sex chromosome system documented so far in plants (12-28 Myr old). Based on the estimated age, we predicted that it should be shared by its sister genus Humulus, which is known also to possess XY chromosomes. Here, we used transcriptome sequencing of an F1 family of H. lupulus to identify and study the sex chromosomes in this species using the probabilistic method SEX-DETector. We identified 265 sex-linked genes in H. lupulus, which preferentially mapped to the C. sativa X chromosome. Using phylogenies of sex-linked genes, we showed that a region of the sex chromosomes had already stopped recombining in an ancestor of both species. Furthermore, as in C. sativa, Y-linked gene expression reduction is correlated to the position on the X chromosome, and highly Y degenerated genes showed dosage compensation. We report, for the first time in Angiosperms, a sex chromosome system that is shared by two different genera. Thus, recombination suppression started at least 21-25 Myr ago, and then (either gradually or step-wise) spread to a large part of the sex chromosomes (c. 70%), leading to a degenerated Y chromosome.

Keywords: Humulus lupulus; Cannabaceae; Y degeneration; dioecy; dosage compensation; sex chromosomes.

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