ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2000
The degeneration of Y chromosomes.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2000. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 434 papers.
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434 citing papers in PubMed, 984 citations in OpenAlex.
- Distinct genomic architectures but the same gene underlie the convergent evolution of a plant supergene.Science advances · 2026Article
- Ancient but dynamic: structural expansion, massive gene duplication, and transposable element colonization in a supergene controlling ant social organization.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Life History Consequences of the Prevalence of Aggressive Males Carrying Costly Weapons.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- A chromosome level genome assembly of the marine flowering plant, Torrey's surfgrass (Phyllospadix Torreyi) reveals an exceptionally large Y-chromosome.The Journal of heredity · 2026Article
- Recombination suppression in plant adaptation and speciation.The New phytologist · 2026Review
- Chromosome-specific drift under stabilizing selection generates polygenic barriers to sex chromosome turnover.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Functional validation of a white pupae minimal gene construct in Ceratitis capitata (Diptera: Tephritidae).Insect science · 2026Article
- Different sex determination systems in two closely related Eurasian minnow (Phoxinus) species.Heredity · 2026Article
- Mixed evidence for intralocus sexual conflict from male-limited selection in Drosophila melanogaster.The Journal of heredity · 2026Article
- The evolutionary genomics of meiotic drive.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Massive Genomic and Transcriptomic Changes Within a Young Inversion Polymorphism in the Absence of Degeneration.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of sex determination in Branchiostoma belcheri driven by repeated transposition of a single novel gene.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Acquisition of ampliconic sequences marks a selfish mouse t-haplotype.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Genetic diversity of the Y-chromosome in domestic animals: from evolutionary insights to functional implications.Molecular biology reports · 2025Review
- Structural and evolutionary features of red algal UV sex chromosomes.Genome biology · 2025Article
- A W chromosome-derived feminizing piRNA in pyralid moths demonstrates convergent evolution for primary sex determination signals in Lepidoptera.BMC biology · 2025Article
- Identification of Y-chromosome Turnover in Newts Fails to Support a Sex Chromosome Origin for the Triturus Balanced Lethal System.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Genomic evidence for males of exceptional reproductive output (ERO) in apes and humans.National science review · 2025Article
- Genomic origins and evolution of neo-sex chromosomes in Pacific Island birds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Replicate geographic transects across a hybrid zone reveal parallelism and differences in the genetic architecture of reproductive isolation.Evolution letters · 2025Article
374 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Y chromosomes are genetically degenerate, having lost most of the active genes that were present in their ancestors. The causes of this degeneration have attracted much attention from evolutionary theorists. Four major theories are reviewed here: Muller's ratchet, background selection, the Hill Robertson effect with weak selection, and the 'hitchhiking' of deleterious alleles by favourable mutations. All of these involve a reduction in effective population size as a result of selective events occurring in a non-recombining genome, and the consequent weakening of the efficacy of selection. We review the consequences of these processes for patterns of molecular evolution and variation at loci on Y chromosomes, and discuss the results of empirical studies of these patterns for some evolving Y-chromosome and neo-Y-chromosome systems. These results suggest that the effective population sizes of evolving Y or neo-Y chromosomes are severely reduced, as expected if some or all of the hypothesized processes leading to degeneration are operative. It is, however, currently unclear which of the various processes is most important; some directions for future work to help to resolve this question are discussed.
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