Turtles of the genera Geoemyda and Pangshura (Testudines: Geoemydidae) lack differentiated sex chromosomes: the end of a 40-year error cascade for Pangshura

PeerJ

article

Sofia Mazzoleni¹  Barbora Augstenová¹  Lorenzo Clemente¹  Markus Auer²  Uwe Fritz²  Peter Praschag³  Tomáš Protiva⁴  Petr Velenský⁵  Lukáš Kratochvíl¹  Michail Rovatsos¹ 

[1] Department of Ecology, Charles University;Museum of Zoology;Turtle Island;landsnails.org;Prague Zoological Garden

关键词: Comparative genome hybridization;    FISH;    Sex determination;    Evolution;    Telomeres;    Microsatellite;    Karyotype;    Turtles;    Sex chromosomes;   

DOI  :  10.7717/peerj.6241

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Inra

【 摘 要 】

For a long time, turtles of the family Geoemydidae have been considered exceptional because representatives of this family were thought to possess a wide variety of sex determination systems. In the present study, we cytogenetically studied Geoemyda spengleri and G. japonica and re-examined the putative presence of sex chromosomes in Pangshura smithii. Karyotypes were examined by assessing the occurrence of constitutive heterochromatin, by comparative genome hybridization and in situ hybridization with repetitive motifs, which are often accumulated on differentiated sex chromosomes in reptiles. We found similar karyotypes, similar distributions of constitutive heterochromatin and a similar topology of tested repetitive motifs for all three species. We did not detect differentiated sex chromosomes in any of the species. For P. smithii, a ZZ/ZW sex determination system, with differentiated sex chromosomes, was described more than 40 years ago, but this finding has never been re-examined and was cited in all reviews of sex determination in reptiles. Here, we show that the identification of sex chromosomes in the original report was based on the erroneous pairing of chromosomes in the karyogram, causing over decades an error cascade regarding the inferences derived from the putative existence of female heterogamety in geoemydid turtles.

【 授权许可】

CC BY