Sex chromosome evolution in haploid plants: Microchromosomes, disappearing chromosomes, and giant chromosomes

Abstract

As in many diploid organisms with genetic sex determination, haploid-dominant organisms have also evolved sex chromosomes or extensive genomic regions that lack genetic recombination. An understanding of sex chromosome evolution should explain the causes and consequences of such regions in both diploids and haploids. However, haploids have been little studied, even though differences from sex chromosomes in diploids carry implications concerning the evolution of suppressed recombination in diploid organisms, and make predictions about genome evolution in the sex-linked regions of haploids that can now be tested by approaches using genome sequences. I review these ideas, and the current empirical evidence concerning them, in more detail than recent reviews focusing on progress in understanding the mechanisms involved in sex determination. I also discuss evidence that one specific prediction, that genetic degeneration should be minor in haploids, is not upheld. I suggest that this prediction does not take account of all processes leading to gene loss from sex-linked regions and that profound degeneration may evolve if sex-linked genes become duplicated to autosomes, a process that also appears to occur in diploids. I emphasize types of data that are needed to make progress in testing several of the ideas described.

Keywords: duplication; genetic degeneration; microchromosomes; recombination; turnovers.