Back

Single-Cell Transcriptomics reveals relaxed evolutionary constraint of spermatogenesis in two passerine birds as compared to mammals

Segami Marzal, J. C.; Semon, M.; Cunha, C.; Bergin, C.; Mugal, C. F.; Qvarnstrom, A.

2022-01-23 evolutionary biology
10.1101/2022.01.22.477241 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Spermatogenesis is a complex process where spermatogonia develop into haploid, mobile sperm cells. The genes guiding this process are subject to an evolutionary trade-off between preserving basic functions of sperm while acquiring new traits ensuring advantages in competition over fertilization of female gametes. In species with XY sex chromosomes, the outcome of this trade-off is found to vary across the stages of spermatogenesis but remains unexplored for species with ZW sex chromosomes. Here we characterize avian spermatogenesis at single cell resolution from testis of collared and pied flycatchers. We find evidence for relaxed evolutionary constraint of genes expressed in spermatocyte cells going through meiosis. An overrepresentation of Z-linked differentially expressed genes between the two species at this stage suggests that this relaxed constraint is associated with the lack of sex-chromosome silencing during meiosis. We conclude that the high throughput of bird spermatogenesis, at least partly, is explained by relaxed developmental constraint.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.