Timothy Smith, Temitayo Olagunju, Benjamin Rosen, Holly Neibergs, Gabrielle Becker, Kimberly Davenport, Christine Elsik, Tracy Hadfield, Sergey Koren, Kristen Kuhn, Arang Rhie, Katie Shira, Amy Skibiel, Morgan Stegemiller, Jacob Thorne, Patricia Villamediana, Noelle Cockett, Brenda Murdoch
Reference genomes of cattle and sheep have lacked contiguous assemblies of the sex-determining Y chromosome. We assembled complete and gapless telomere to telomere (T2T) Y chromosomes for these species. The pseudo-autosomal regions were similar in length, but the total chromosome size was substantially different, with the cattle Y more than twice the length of the sheep Y. The length disparity was accounted for by expanded ampliconic region in cattle. The genic amplification in cattle contrasts with pseudogenization in sheep suggesting opposite evolutionary mechanisms since their divergence 18MYA...
April 3, 2024: Research Square