When Nettie Steven discovered the Y chromosome in 1905 while studying the mealworm Tenebrio molitor, she identified it as a sex-determining chromosome. As it turns out, the chromosome also has important functions beyond determining sex. According to a study published July 14 in Science, a lack of the Y chromosome in bone marrow cells causes heart failure.
The work was led by Lars Forsberg, a geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden, and Kenneth Walsh of the University of Virginia. Their team zeroed in on mosaic loss of Y chromosome (mLOY), a condition where some of a male’s somatic cells, particularly white blood cells, lose the Y chromosome. This condition, which is heavily associated with tobacco smoking, affects more than 40 percent of 70-year-old men in the UK Biobank cohort and is associated with a long list of illnesses, including Alzheimer’s disease.
In a previous study, Forsberg and his colleagues had ...
