Female Supremacy Articles - Page 14

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"What had looked like a simple yes or no has turned into a thousand shades of gray," said molecular biologist David Page, an expert on sex evolution at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass.

Illuminating this complex palette was the work of an international team of 250 scientists led by geneticist Mark Ross at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England. The team produced the first complete sequence of the X chromosome about two years after the decoding of the male Y chromosome.

The researchers found that the X chromosome, though relatively poor in genes, is rich in influence, deceptively subtle, and occasionally deadly to males.

The international team identified 1,098 functional genes along the X chromosome, more than 14 times as many as scientists had located on the tiny Y chromosome.

Science - Reuters

X Chromosome Shows Why Women Differ from Men

By Patricia Reaney

Wed Mar 16

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have cracked the genetic code of the female X chromosome which is linked to more than 300 human diseases and may help to explain why women are so different from men.

It contains 1,100 genes, or about five percent of the human genome, along with information that may help to improve the diagnosis of illnesses ranging from hemophilia, blindness and autism to obesity and leukemia.