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Browsing by Author "Hall, Andrew Brantley"

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    Complete Dosage Compensation in Anopheles stephensi and the Evolution of Sex-Biased Genes in Mosquitoes
    Jiang, Xiaofang; Biedler, James K.; Qi, Yumin; Hall, Andrew Brantley; Tu, Zhijian Jake (Oxford University Press, 2015-06-09)
    Complete dosage compensation refers to hyperexpression of the entire X or Z chromosome in organisms with heterogametic sex chromosomes (XYmale or ZW female) in order to compensate for having only one copy of the X or Z chromosome. Recent analyses suggest that complete dosage compensation, as in Drosophila melanogaster, may not be the norm. There has been no systematic study focusing on dosage compensation in mosquitoes. However, analysis of dosage compensation in Anopheles mosquitoes provides opportunities for evolutionary insights, as theXchromosome of Anopheles and that of its Dipteran relative,D. melanogaster formed independently from the same ancestral chromosome. Furthermore, Culicinae mosquitoes, including the Aedes genus, have homomorphic sex-determining chromosomes, negating the need for dosage compensation. Thus, Culicinae genes provide a rare phylogenetic context to investigate dosage compensation in Anopheles mosquitoes. Here, we performed RNA-seq analysis ofmale andfemale samplesof theAsian malariamosquitoAnopheles stephensiandtheyellow fevermosquitoAedes aegypti.Autosomaland X-linked genes in An. stephensi showed very similar levels of expression in both males and females, indicating complete dosage compensation. The uniformity of average expression levels of autosomal and X-linked genes remained when An. stephensi gene expression was normalized by that of their Ae. aegypti orthologs, strengthening the finding of complete dosage compensation in Anopheles. In addition,we comparatively analyzed the differentially expressed genes between adultmales and adult females in both species, investigated sex-biased gene chromosomal distribution patterns in An. stephensi and provided three examples where gene duplications may have enabled the acquisition of sex-specific expression during mosquito evolution.
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    Identification and Characterization of Y Chromosome and M Locus Genes in Anopheles and Aedes Mosquitoes Using the Chromosome Quotient Method
    Hall, Andrew Brantley (Virginia Tech, 2016-03-22)
    In mosquitoes, sex determination is initiated by a dominant male-determining factor located on the Y chromosome in Anopheles mosquitoes or in a small Y-like region called the M locus in Aedes mosquitoes. Before my research, not a single gene from the Anopheles Y or Aedes M locus had ever been discovered. During the course of my undergraduate research in the Tu lab, I developed the chromosome quotient (CQ) method which identifies Y chromosome/M locus sequences by comparing the ratio of alignments from separate pools of female and male Illumina sequencing data. The focus of my dissertation is using the CQ method to identify potential male-determining factors in Aedes and Anopheles mosquitoes. First, we identified a novel gene tightly-linked to the M locus in Aedes aegypti called myo-sex. Myo-sex encodes a myosin heavy chain protein that is highly expressed in the pupa and adult male. Myo-sex is generally only found in males, but can sporadically be found in females due to a rare recombination. The fact that myo-sex can be found in females combined with a lack of early-embryonic expression suggests that myo-sex is not the male-determining factor. Next, we identified a gene in Aedes aegypti, Nix, which appeared to be persistently linked to the M locus and was expressed in the early embryo. Nix shows distant similarity at the amino acid level to Transformer2, a gene involved in the sex determination pathway of Drosophila melanogaster. Nix knockout with CRISPR/Cas9 resulted in feminization of genetic males and the production of the female isoforms of doublesex and fruitless, two key regulators of downstream sexual differentiation. Ectopic expression of Nix resulted in masculinization of genetic females. Based on these results, we concluded that Nix is a male-determining factor in Aedes aegypti. We also characterized large portions of the Anopheles gambiae Y chromosome using PacBio sequencing and the CQ method. We discovered that 92.3 percent of predicted Y sequences fell into two classes, the zanzibar amplified region (ZAR) and the satellite amplified region (SAR). This analysis fills in a large piece of the Anopheles gambiae genome missing since 2002.
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    Insights into the Preservation of the Homomorphic Sex-Determining Chromosome of Aedes aegypti from the Discovery of a Male-Biased Gene Tightly Linked to the M-Locus
    Hall, Andrew Brantley; Timoshevskiy, Vladimir A.; Sharakhova, Maria V.; Jiang, Xiaofang; Basu, Sanjay; Anderson, Michelle A. E.; Hu, Wanqi; Sharakhov, Igor V.; Adelman, Zach N.; Tu, Zhijian Jake (Oxford University Press, 2014-01-01)
    The preservation of a homomorphic sex-determining chromosome in some organisms without transformation into a heteromorphic sex chromosome is a long-standing enigma in evolutionary biology. A dominant sex-determining locus (or M-locus) in an undifferentiated homomorphic chromosome confers the male phenotype in the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti. Genetic evidence suggests that the M-locus is in a nonrecombining region. However, the molecular nature of the M-locus has not been characterized. Using a recently developed approach based on Illumina sequencing of male and female genomic DNA, we identified a novel gene, myo-sex, that is present almost exclusively in the male genome but can sporadically be found in the female genome due to recombination. For simplicity, we define sequences that are primarily found in the male genome as male-biased. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) on A. aegypti chromosomes demonstrated that the myo-sex probe localized to region 1q21, the established location of theM-locus.Myo-sex is a duplicated myosin heavy chain gene that is highly expressed in the pupa and adult male.Myo-sex shares 83% nucleotide identity and 97% amino acid identity with its closest autosomal paralog, consistent with ancient duplication followed by strong purifying selection. Compared with males, myo-sex is expressed at very low levels in the females that acquired it, indicating that myo-sexmay be sexually antagonistic. This study establishes a framework to discover male-biased sequences within a homomorphic sex-determining chromosome and offers new insights into the evolutionary forces that have impeded the expansion of the nonrecombining M-locus in A. aegypti.
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    Six novel Y chromosome genes in Anopheles mosquitoes discovered by independently sequencing males and females
    Hall, Andrew Brantley; Qi, Yumin; Timoshevskiy, Vladimir A.; Sharakhova, Maria V.; Sharakhov, Igor V.; Tu, Zhijian Jake (Biomed Central, 2013-04-23)
    Background Y chromosomes are responsible for the initiation of male development, male fertility, and other male-related functions in diverse species. However, Y genes are rarely characterized outside a few model species due to the arduous nature of studying the repeat-rich Y. Results The chromosome quotient (CQ) is a novel approach to systematically discover Y chromosome genes. In the CQ method, genomic DNA from males and females is sequenced independently and aligned to candidate reference sequences. The female to male ratio of the number of alignments to a reference sequence, a parameter called the chromosome quotient (CQ), is used to determine whether the sequence is Y-linked. Using the CQ method, we successfully identified known Y sequences from Homo sapiens and Drosophila melanogaster. The CQ method facilitated the discovery of Y chromosome sequences from the malaria mosquitoes Anopheles stephensi and An. gambiae. Comparisons to transcriptome sequence data with blastn led to the discovery of six Anopheles Y genes, three from each species. All six genes are expressed in the early embryo. Two of the three An. stephensi Y genes were recently acquired from the autosomes or the X. Although An. stephensi and An. gambiae belong to the same subgenus, we found no evidence of Y genes shared between the species. Conclusions The CQ method can reliably identify Y chromosome sequences using the ratio of alignments from male and female sequence data. The CQ method is widely applicable to species with fragmented genome assemblies produced from next-generation sequencing data. Analysis of the six Y genes characterized in this study indicates rapid Y chromosome evolution between An. stephensi and An. gambiae. The Anopheles Y genes discovered by the CQ method provide unique markers for population and phylogenetic analysis, and opportunities for novel mosquito control measures through the manipulation of sexual dimorphism and fertility.