Does Codon Preference in Fungi Presage Human Sex-Linked Diseases?

By studying the fungus Neurospora tetrasperma, Hanna Johannesson of Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, and her collaborators are gaining insights into the early evolution of sex chromosomes—most notably how, in regions of suppressed recombination, such chromosomes retain mutations. Although sex chromosomes in mammals retain few traces of what drove their development during evolution, these findings from fungi might help to explain, for example, how deleterious, disease-inducing mutations along sex chromosomes are retained for many generations. Details appear in the April 2011 Eukaryotic Cell (10:594–603).