Female Supremacy Articles - Page 18

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Carrel and Willard published their results in Nature this week. Commenting on the findings, Chris Gunter, senior editor at Nature's Washington office, compared women to calico cats.

"The calico cat is a good model for X inactivation," said Gunter, "because the cat's coat is a mosaic. In a similar way women are a mosaic of the X chromosomes inherited from their mother and father."

A second paper in Nature reveals more secrets about the X, and in particular, how damage to it causes disease.

Allan Bradley, director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, where much of the sequencing was carried out, said, "We often describe the results of sequencing as a 'catalog of human genes.' The results of projects such as the finished X chromosome are so much more than that. They are the forces that will drive biomedical advance in the U.K. and around the world."

That's because more than 300 genetic conditions are linked to the X chromosome, by far the highest proportion of any chromosome. They range from color blindness to autism, muscular dystrophy to leukemia and hemophilia.

Many of these conditions are far more common in men than women. That's because women, with two copies of the X, have a backup in case of mutation. Men, with one X and a tiny Y chromosome containing only seven genes in common with the X, have no such backup.