"Carrel and Willard published their results in Nature this week.
Commenting on the findings, Chris Gunter, senior editor at Nature's
Washington office, compared women to calico cats."

In the LA Times article today the researcher said there were greater
genetic differences between men and women than between men and
chimpanzees.   Watch the feminists come out of the woodwork on this.
Their whole legal claim to mandated sexual equality is based on little
or no sex differences.

Tom Smith (QIM)
American Union of Men
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aum/?yguid=10837983


http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,66919,00.html


Why X Marks the Gender
By Rowan Hooper


02:00 AM Mar. 17, 2005 PT


With the publication this week of the gene sequence of the X
chromosome, we will start to find genetic reasons for why the sexes are
different, beyond XX and XY.


One clue leaps straight out of the mass of sequence data detailing the
1,098 genes found on the X: Of 40 women whose X chromosomes were looked
at, all of them showed extensive variation in gene activity.



Huntington Willard, director of the Institute for Genome Sciences &
Policy at Duke University in North Carolina, said that this meant that
effectively there are two different human genomes, one male and one
female.


"We looked at the X chromosomes of 40 women and every one of them had a
unique pattern of gene expression," Willard said. "All of that
variation is completely unique to women. The X chromosomes of males are
all the same in this regard."


Women (and all female mammals) have two copies of the X chromosome, but
the extra copy isn't needed, and is switched off in a process called X
inactivation. Or that's what scientists thought.


"Our study shows that the inactive X in women is not as silent as we
thought," said co-author Laura Carrel, a molecular biologist at Penn
State College of Medicine, in Hershey, Pennsylvania. "The effects of
these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the
differences between men and women that aren't attributable to sex
hormones."


Carrel and Willard published their results in Nature this week.
Commenting on the findings, Chris Gunter, senior editor at Nature's
Washington office, compared women to calico cats.


"The calico cat is a good model for X inactivation," said Gunter,
"because the cat's coat is a mosaic. In a similar way women are a
mosaic of the X chromosomes inherited from their mother and father."


A second paper in Nature reveals more secrets about the X, and in
particular, how damage to it causes disease.


Allan Bradley, director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in
Cambridge, United Kingdom, where much of the sequencing was carried
out, said, "We often describe the results of sequencing as a 'catalog
of human genes.' The results of projects such as the finished X
chromosome are so much more than that. They are the forces that will
drive biomedical advance in the U.K. and around the world."


That's because more than 300 genetic conditions are linked to the X
chromosome, by far the highest proportion of any chromosome. They range
from color blindness to autism, muscular dystrophy to leukemia and
hemophilia.


Many of these conditions are far more common in men than women. That's
because women, with two copies of the X, have a backup in case of
mutation. Men, with one X and a tiny Y chromosome containing only seven
genes in common with the X, have no such backup.


"The X chromosome was pivotal in early human genetics because we were
able to see clearly how mutations cause disease," said David Bentley,
head of human genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and an
author of the sequence paper. "We know what goes wrong with a high
diversity of human diseases associated with the X."


The X chromosome includes the gene that causes Duchenne muscular
dystrophy, the largest known gene at 2.2 million base pairs long.


"From studying such genes, we can get remarkable insight into disease
processes," said Mark Ross, leader of the Human X Chromosome Project at
the Sanger Institute.


The X chromosome also has stories to tell about human evolution -- the
new code reveals that the X and Y evolved from a pair of regular
chromosomes 300 million years ago -- and even human history.


Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia but did not suffer from the
disorder, meaning that she had the gene causing the disease on one of
her X chromosomes but not on the other. She passed the gene to her
granddaughter Alexandra, and through Alexandra's marriage, to the heir
to the last czar of imperial Russia, Alexis. It's been suggested that
Alexis' hemophilia led indirectly to the Russian revolution.


And so, too, the genome-sequencing revolution rolls on. Don't expect it
to end any time soon.


"One of the findings from the sequencing of the X chromosome is that
there are more genes involved in disease than we think," said Bentley.



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