ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Polygenic sex determination produces modular sex polymorphism in an African cichlid fish.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Multivariate Models of Animal Sex: Breaking Binaries Leads to a Better Understanding of Ecology and Evolution.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Pooled it
- Genome-Wide Characterization of Sex-Linked Regions in the Sangzhi Horned Toad (Boulenophrys sangzhiensis) Reveals Complex Sex Determination Mechanisms.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Different sex determination systems in two closely related Eurasian minnow (Phoxinus) species.Heredity · 2026Article
- Sex-Linked Differentiation in Commercially Exploited Fishes: Rethinking Population Structure in Dynamic Marine Environments.Global change biology · 2025Article
- A Chromosome Inversion Creates a Supergene for Sex and Colour in Lake Malawi Cichlids.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Insights into the genetic basis of bilateral head asymmetry in a scale-eating cichlid fish.Science advances · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Polygenic sex determination in vertebrates - is there any such thing?Trends in genetics : TIG · 2023Review
- No evidence for sex chromosomes in natural populations of the cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2023Article
- Master-Key Regulators of Sex Determination in Fish and Other Vertebrates-A Review.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- East African cichlid fishes.EvoDevo · 2023Review
- Something Fishy about Siamese Fighting Fish (Cells · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
For many vertebrates, a single genetic locus initiates a cascade of developmental sex differences in the gonad and throughout the organism, resulting in adults with two phenotypically distinct sexes. Species with polygenic sex determination (PSD) have multiple interacting sex determination alleles segregating within a single species, allowing for more than two genotypic sexes and scenarios where sex genotype at a given locus can be decoupled from gonadal sex. Here we investigate the effects of PSD on secondary sexual characteristics in the cichlid fish Metriaclima mbenjii, where one female (W) and one male (Y) sex determination allele interact to produce siblings with four possible sex classes: ZZXX females, ZWXX females, ZWXY females, and ZZXY males. We find that PSD in M. mbenjii produces an interplay of sex linkage and sex limitation resulting in modular variation in morphological and behavioral traits. Further, the evolution or introgression of a newly acquired sex determiner creates additional axes of phenotypic variation for varied traits, including genital morphology, craniofacial morphology, gastrointestinal morphology, and home tank behaviors. In contrast to single-locus sex determination, which broadly results in sexual dimorphism, polygenic sex determination can induce higher-order sexual polymorphism. The modularity of secondary sexual characteristics produced by PSD provides context for understanding the evolutionary causes and consequences of maintenance, gain, or loss of sex determination alleles in populations.
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