Are Geckos Special in Sex Determination? Independently Evolved Differentiated ZZ/ZW Sex Chromosomes in Carphodactylid Geckos.

ABSTRACT: Amniotes possess astonishing variability in sex determination ranging from environmental sex determination (ESD) to genotypic sex determination (GSD) with highly differentiated sex chromosomes. Geckos are one of the few amniote groups with substantial variability in sex determination. What makes them special in this respect? We hypothesized that the extraordinary variability of sex determination in geckos can be explained by two alternatives: 1) unusual lability of sex determination, predicting that the current GSD systems were recently formed and are prone to turnovers; and 2) independent transitions from the ancestral ESD to later stable GSD, which assumes that geckos possessed ancestrally ESD, but once sex chromosomes emerged, they remain stable in the long term. Here, based on genomic

SUBMITTER: Augstenova B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8290109 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature