Men, Relax: The Y Chromosome is Alive and Well
Men, contrary to what you may have been hearing, the male chromosome is not destined to disappear. According to Medical News Daily (MND), "The Y chromosome has lost 90 percent of the genes it once shared with the X chromosome, and some scientists have speculated that the Y chromosome will disappear in less than 5 million years," said evolutionary biologist Melissa A. Wilson Sayres, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the new analysis. Though some mammals have already lost their Y chromosome, they still have males and females, and reproduce normally, MND reports. And last month, researchers reported shuffling some genes in mice to create Y-less males that could produce normal offspring, leading some commentators to wonder whether the chromosome is superfluous. "Our study demonstrates that the genes that have been maintained, and those that migrated from the X to the Y, a...