Boa imperator and Python bivittatus TONY GAMBLEFor more than 50 years, scientists have taken for granted that all snakes share a ZW sex determination system, in which males have two Z chromosomes and females have one Z and one W. But a study, published today (July 6) in Current Biology, reveals that the Central American boa (Boa imperator) and the Burmese python (Python bivittatus) use an XY sex determination system, which evolved independently in the two species.
“This work is a culmination of a lot of questions that we’ve had about pythons and boas for a long time,” says Jenny Marshall Graves, a geneticist at La Trobe Univeristy in Melbourne, Australia, who did not participate in the study.
Some of these questions came up for Warren Booth, a geneticist and ecologist at the University of Tulsa, as he studied parthenogenesis—the growth and development of offspring in the absence of fertilization. He noticed a pattern for organisms undergoing parthenogenesis: animal species that use a ZW system have only male (ZZ) offspring, and the organisms that use an XY system have only female (XX) offspring. Except this pattern doesn’t hold true for boas and pythons, who consistently produce female offspring by parthenogenesis.
Booth contacted ...
