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by Locke1689 4432 days ago
But wouldn't that just make whatever chromosome carries this gene the new allosome? I was reading the statement as SRY moves to an autosome and then some other process regulates expression.

FWIW, biology was the one science course I never took, so I have no idea what I'm talking about.

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But wouldn't that just make whatever chromosome carries this gene the new allosome?

Haha, maybe so, I guess that's a matter of definitions...

I was reading the statement as SRY moves to an autosome and then some other process regulates expression.

SRY translocation is not unheard-of (cf. SRY-positive 46,XX testicular "disorder"), but that's not what Prof. Kuroiwa is saying. He's talking about a change that allows a different gene to code the same proteins that SRY codes. That change could be to the gene in question, or to something else that governs how it is expressed. There's a whole family of genes (SOX) that exist all over, on both allosomes and autosomes, which are similar to SRY, and one would imagine these might substitute for it. Looking around a bit more, I find wikipedia links to a paper [0] that claims the substitute SRY is actually a group of multiple genes on X, which group of genes did translocate from Y. Fascinating stuff!

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12900579