De novo transcriptome assembly reveals sex-specific selection acting on evolving neo-sex chromosomes in Drosophila miranda.

BackgroundThe Drosophila miranda neo-sex chromosome system is a useful resource for studying recently evolved sex chromosomes. However, the neo-Y genomic assembly is fragmented due to the accumulation of repetitive sequence. Furthermore, the separate assembly of the neo-X and neo-Y chromosomes into genomic scaffolds has proven to be difficult, due to their low level of sequence divergence, which in coding regions is about 1.5%. Here, we de novo assemble the transcriptome of D. miranda using RNA-seq data from several male and female tissues, and develop a bioinformatic pipeline to separately reconstruct neo-X and neo-Y transcripts.ResultsWe obtain 2,141 transcripts from the neo-X and 1,863 from the neo-Y. Neo-Y transcripts are generally shorter than their homologous neo-X transcripts (N50 of 2,048-bp vs. 2,775-bp) and expressed at lower levels. We find that 24% of expressed neo-Y transcripts harbor nonsense mutation within their open reading frames, yet most non-functional neo-Y genes are expressed throughout all of their length. We find evidence of gene loss of male-specific genes on the neo-X chromosome, and transcriptional silencing of testis-specific genes from the neo-X.ConclusionsNonsense mediated decay (NMD) has been implicated to degrade transcripts containing pre-mature termination codons (PTC) in Drosophila, but rampant description of neo-Y genes with pre-mature stop codons suggests that it does not play a major role in down-regulating transcripts from the neo-Y. Loss or transcriptional down-regulation of genes from the neo-X with male-biased function provides evidence for beginning demasculinization of the neo-X. Thus, evolving sex chromosomes can rapidly shift their gene content or patterns of gene expression in response to their sex-biased transmission, supporting the idea that sex-specific or sexually antagonistic selection plays a major role in the evolution of heteromorphic sex chromosomes

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We report on recent progress in the evaluation of next-to-leading order (NLO) observables using Lipatov's QCD high energy effective action. We calculate both real and virtual corrections to the quark induced forward jet vertex at NLO, making use of a new regularization method and a subtraction mechanism. As a new result we determine the real part of the NLO Mueller-Tang impact factor which is the only missing element for a complete NLO BFKL description of dijet events with a rapidity gap.Comment: 4 pages, 29 figures, proceedings of the XX Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects, 26-30 March, University of Bonn (2012

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