Research article
Deciphering neo-sex and B chromosome evolution by the draft genome of Drosophila albomicans
- † Equal contributors
1 CAS-Max Planck Junior Research Group, State Key Laboratory of Genetic Resources and Evolution, Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, Yunnan 650223, China
2 Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
3 Beijing Genomics Institute-Shenzhen, Shenzhen 518083, China
4 Department of Biology, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305, USA
BMC Genomics 2012, 13:109 doi:10.1186/1471-2164-13-109
Published: 22 March 2012Abstract
Background
Drosophila albomicans is a unique model organism for studying both sex chromosome and B chromosome evolution. A pair of its autosomes comprising roughly 40% of the whole genome has fused to the ancient X and Y chromosomes only about 0.12 million years ago, thereby creating the youngest and most gene-rich neo-sex system reported to date. This species also possesses recently derived B chromosomes that show non-Mendelian inheritance and significantly influence fertility.
Methods
We sequenced male flies with B chromosomes at 124.5-fold genome coverage using next-generation sequencing. To characterize neo-Y specific changes and B chromosome sequences, we also sequenced inbred female flies derived from the same strain but without B's at 28.5-fold.
Results
We assembled a female genome and placed 53% of the sequence and 85% of the annotated proteins into specific chromosomes, by comparison with the 12 Drosophila genomes. Despite its very recent origin, the non-recombining neo-Y chromosome shows various signs of degeneration, including a significant enrichment of non-functional genes compared to the neo-X, and an excess of tandem duplications relative to other chromosomes. We also characterized a B-chromosome linked scaffold that contains an actively transcribed unit and shows sequence similarity to the subcentromeric regions of both the ancient X and the neo-X chromosome.
Conclusions
Our results provide novel insights into the very early stages of sex chromosome evolution and B chromosome origination, and suggest an unprecedented connection between the births of these two systems in D. albomicans.
