![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() It's much more genetic horsepower, so to speak, in every female cell compared to male cells. So what that actually means is another 250 genes. What we're discovering right now is not only that females are made up of two populations of cells that are cooperating, but actually within the individual cells, females have access to about 25% of the so-called silenced X. Sharon - The dogma around this was, for many years, that having two X chromosomes, that they only predominantly use one, that one was shut down early on in development. He explained to Phil Sansom that not only does this mosaicism help females in loads of ways, but that it's more complicated: some of the genes from the ‘switched off’ X chromosome somehow survive the switching off, through a mechanism that’s not yet understood, and go on to help out even further… This is the subject of a recent book by geneticist Sharon Moalem, called 'The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women'. But for each cell, the X that gets switched off is random - so an adult female is a melting pot for two different families of cells. In mammals, females have two X chromosomes whereas males have one, and females compensate by ‘switching off’ one of them while still an embryo. ![]()
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