Does gene dosage really matter?

Jennifer A Marshall Graves¹ and Christine M Disteche²

¹Research School of Biological Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia

²Departments of Pathology and Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

author email corresponding author email

Journal of Biology 2007, 6:1doi:10.1186/jbiol55


Published:	22 March 2007

Abstract

Mechanisms to compensate for dosage differences of genes on sex chromosomes are widespread in animals and have been thought to be critical for viability. However, in birds, compensation is inefficient, implying that for many genes dosage compensation is not critical, and for some genes, dosage differences have even been selected for.