Judith Elizabeth Mank | |
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Born | 1976 (age 47–48) |
Alma mater | University of Georgia University of Florida Pennsylvania State University |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | University of Oxford University College London University of British Columbia |
Thesis | The evolution of reproductive and genomic diversity in ray-finned fishes (2006) |
Judith Elizabeth Mank is an American-British-Canadian zoologist who is a Canada 150 Chair at the University of British Columbia. She studies how evolution produces variation in animals. She is known for her studies of sex chromosomes and the genetic basis of sexual dimorphism. Her research has focused on various animals to study how sexual selection influences gene expression and genomic architecture.
Mank studied anthropology at the University of Florida. [1] She moved to Pennsylvania State University for graduate studies, joining the School of Forest Resources. [1] After completing her master's degree she moved to the University of Georgia for doctoral research with John Avise. Her research focused on reproductive diversity in fish. [2] [3]
Following her postdoctoral work at Uppsala University, Mank was a lecturer at the University of Oxford from 2008-2012, and then professor at University College London from 2012-2018. [4] She joined the faculty at the University of British Columbia in 2018 as a professor and Canada 150 Chair in Evolutionary Genomics. [5] Her research includes the evolution of sex chromosomes and the genetics underlying sex differences. [6] Her work has revealed fundamental properties of the earliest stages of Y chromosomes formation. [7] Mank makes use of genomic data to understand how ecological factors, such as sexual selection, effect genome evolution, and how sex differences are encoded within the genome. She has studied the genetics of female mate preference in guppies, and how this affects the diversity and genetics of pigmentation in males. [8]
Thomas Hunt Morgan was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist, embryologist, and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role that the chromosome plays in heredity.
A sex-determination system is a biological system that determines the development of sexual characteristics in an organism. Most organisms that create their offspring using sexual reproduction have two common sexes and a few less common intersex variations.
The Y chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes in therian mammals and other organisms. Along with the X chromosome, it is part of the XY sex-determination system, in which the Y is the sex-determining chromosome because the presence of the Y chromosome causes offspring produced in sexual reproduction to be of male sex. In mammals, the Y chromosome contains the SRY gene, which triggers development of male gonads. The Y chromosome is passed only from male parents to male offspring.
In biology, gonochorism is a sexual system where there are two sexes and each individual organism is either male or female. The term gonochorism is usually applied in animal species, the vast majority of which are gonochoric.
Nettie Maria Stevens was an American geneticist who discovered sex chromosomes. In 1905, soon after the rediscovery of Mendel's paper on genetics in 1900, she observed that male mealworms produced two kinds of sperm, one with a large chromosome and one with a small chromosome. When the sperm with the large chromosome fertilized eggs, they produced female offspring, and when the sperm with the small chromosome fertilized eggs, they produced male offspring. The pair of sex chromosomes that she studied later became known as the X and Y chromosomes.
The XO sex-determination system is a system that some species of insects, arachnids, and mammals use to determine the sex of offspring. In this system, there is only one sex chromosome, referred to as X. Males only have one X chromosome (XO), while females have two (XX). The letter O signifies the lack of a Y chromosome. Maternal gametes always contain an X chromosome, so the sex of the animals' offspring depends on whether a sex chromosome is present in the male gamete. Its sperm normally contains either one X chromosome or no sex chromosomes at all.
Barbara J. Meyer is a biologist and genetist, noted for her pioneering research on lambda phage, a virus that infects bacteria; discovery of the master control gene involved in sex determination; and studies of gene regulation, particularly dosage compensation. Meyer's work has revealed mechanisms of sex determination and dosage compensation—that balance X-chromosome gene expression between the sexes in Caenorhabditis elegans that continue to serve as the foundation of diverse areas of study on chromosome structure and function today.
An organism's sex is female if it produces the ovum, the type of gamete that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.
John Charles Avise is an American evolutionary geneticist, conservationist, natural historian, and prolific science author. He is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolution, University of California, Irvine, and was previously a Distinguished Professor of Genetics at the University of Georgia.
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Melissa A. Wilson is an evolutionary and computational biologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies the evolution of sex chromosomes.
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