The male Y chromosome is retained

The male Y chromosome is small, but stable: although it is severely degraded and shrunk in the course of evolution, there is no danger that it completely disappears one day.

For comparison, a new study confirms that there are 27 important genes that exist only on this chromosome and are not transferable to others. As a result, natural selection ensures that the male sex chromosome is retained, the researchers said in the journal "PLoS Genetics".

"The Y chromosome has lost 90 percent of its genes, which once shared it with the X chromosome," says Melissa A. Wilson Sayres of the University of California at Berkeley. Instead of more than 1,100 genes as his female counterpart, it contains now only about 200 of them. Therefore, some researchers suspected that the truncated chromosome could even disappear within the next five million years. In fact, there are some mammalian species in which this is already happening, but there are normal for them male and female - the man is a gender they are not die well.

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