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Review
. 2024 Nov-Dec:163:14-21.
doi: 10.1016/j.semcdb.2024.04.004. Epub 2024 Apr 24.

Out with the old, in with the new: Meiotic driving of sex chromosome evolution

Callie M Swanepoel  1 , Jacob L Mueller  2
Affiliations
Review

Out with the old, in with the new: Meiotic driving of sex chromosome evolution

Callie M Swanepoel et al. Semin Cell Dev Biol. 2024 Nov-Dec.

Abstract

Chromosomal regions with meiotic drivers exhibit biased transmission (> 50 %) over their competing homologous chromosomal region. These regions often have two prominent genetic features: suppressed meiotic crossing over and rapidly evolving multicopy gene families. Heteromorphic sex chromosomes (e.g., XY) often share these two genetic features with chromosomal regions exhibiting meiotic drive. Here, we discuss parallels between meiotic drive and sex chromosome evolution, how the divergence of heteromorphic sex chromosomes can be influenced by meiotic drive, experimental approaches to study meiotic drive on sex chromosomes, and meiotic drive in traditional and non-traditional model organisms with high-quality genome assemblies. The newly available diversity of high-quality sex chromosome sequences allows us to revisit conventional models of sex chromosome evolution through the lens of meiotic drive.

Keywords: Evolution; Meiotic drive; Multicopy genes; Sex chromosomes; Suppressed recombination.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Jacob Mueller reports financial support was provided by National Institutes of Health. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper. Declarations of interest None.

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