The Evolution of Sex Chromosome Dosage Compensation in Animals

Abstract

The evolution of sex chromosomes in the XY or ZW systems shall lead to gene expression dosage problems, as in at least one of the sexes, the sex-linked gene dose has been reduced by half. It has been proposed, most notably by Susumu Ohno for mammals, that the transcriptional output of the whole sex chromosome should be doubled for a complete dosage compensation. However, due to the variability of the existing methods to determine the transcriptional differences between Sex chromosomes and Autosomes (S:A ratios) in different studies, whether clade-specific results are comparable and whether there is a more general model to explain dosage compensation states remain unanswered. In this study, we collected more than 500 public RNA-seq datasets from multiple tissues and species in major clades (including mammals, birds, fishes, insects, and worms) and proposed a unified computational framework for unbiased and comparable measurement of the S:A ratios of multiple species. We also tested the evolution of dosage compensation more directly by assessing changes in the expression levels of the current sex-linked genes relative to those of the ancestral sex-linked genes. We found that in mammals and birds, the S:A ratio is approximately 0.5, while in insects, fishes and flatworms, the S:A ratio is approximately 1. Further analysis showed that the fraction of dosage-sensitive housekeeping genes on the sex chromosome is significantly correlated with the S:A ratio. In addition, the degree of degradation of the Y chromosome may be responsible for the change in the S:A ratio in mammals without a dosage-compensation mechanism. Our observations offer unequivocal support for the sex chromosome insensitivity hypothesis in animals and suggest that the dosage sensitivity states of sex chromosomes is a major factor underlying different evolutionary strategies of dosage compensation.