Chromosome confusion

[nythbran2]

Illustrating a story in today's Times is this graphic including a clear 'Y' chromosome. With this level of biological confusion in editors I am not surprised at some of the stories which are run in the press.

I don't get what your concern is?
The Y chromosome is a bit large and stylized but it's next to an apparently male figure and in a nice masculine blue colour.

Here's a slightly more realistic XY pair: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/25/world/y-chromosome-fully-sequenced-scn

I don't understand either. It's clear he has an X and Y chromosome. Confused.

blue XY and pink XX, what am I missing? Yes the Y chromosome is a stubby pathetic thing but we don't need to go on about it 😂

Is the person in the picture supposed to be Stephen Whittle?

It's the way the Y has a long tail. Maybe just being over fussy.

Men often exaggerate the length of their tails…

Yes, I think you’re being too fussy. I mean it’s written as XY in medical and scientific journals. That lettering means Y has a long tail too, and is equal size to X.

I think it is obvious that it is a graphic representation rather than a photo. I mean, it's blue....

There's an argument for one of the pink X chromosomes being blue or the blokes blue X actually being pink.

So when do the pink ones turn blue? At which part of the developmental process? Obviously it will have to eventually if it's going to be passed on.

I guess during meiosis.

Bloody hell that's so stupid. Clearly the graphic designer doesn't realise or care what those shapes represent.

It's Xs all the way down. All the Xs that men carry were inherited from their mum. If it was inherited from their dad they'd be female.

Perhaps this will settle the debate for once and all; we just need to look at the colour of everyone's chromosomes to see if they are male or female.

Unless you are looking at any from someone born pre 1940s when pink was for boys and blue was for girls.

I thought prior to the 50s/60s everything was in b&w?

😂

Ah yes. Damn. Dark grey and light grey?

I know. But given that there's a clear blue x in the picture, which shows that men have boys x chromosomes rather than girly ones, and given the fact that all x's that men have start out pink because they get them from their mums and given the fact that you say there's an argument for different coloured x chromosomes, then at what point do the necessarily originally pink x chromosomes get turned blue. PP says meiosis, but i think it has to be later after the zygote has formed. Otherwise, how would it know?

Sorry - it's been a really tough day at work...

I'm sorry. I hope you can relax with a cup or glass of something nice.

If we want to be, fwoabw, gendered about it, all X chromosomes should be pink. I suspect (there's probably maths that would nail the odds) will be directly inherited from a female ancestor. Actually I must be tired too otherwise I'd do a Punnett square, but probably no further back than gran. The only reason to have a blue X is to distinguish the one inherited via dad. It was just resting in his gamete.

Meiosis makes logical sense if the colours represent which parent they came from, which is what lcakethereforeIam originally suggested.

Women have a blue X and a pink X but the X's that make it into their eggs are a mix of both because of crossover, and should be coloured pink because from their children's point of view they are maternal.

Men have a pink X and a blue Y, but if the X makes it into a sperm it should be blue because it will be paternal from the point of view of an eventual child.

I completely agree with you that it is logical,@crossant . However, I'm taking the point a bit further. If the male X is blue, but was received from his mum, at which point it would have been pink (as all Xs received by males are received from mums, obviously), there must have been a colour change event from pink to blue. I don't think the colour change could have happened during gamete production because the informational environment could not indicate whether the haploid was destined to fuse with an X or Y. Therefore, it must be in the zygote.

It would probably happen before the first cell division, but then, as we know, things like being bitten by a radioactive spider or being subject to sudden intense bursts of solar radiation can change all the DNA in your body in the same way at the same time.

The only other possibility is that sex selection requires the X a male receives from his mum to be the one she received from her father. It would therefore be blue. This would mean that at some point in the development of sexual reproduction, X chomosomes split into two different types. - a pink female x chromosome and a blue male x chromosome. I am not aware that this is the case, but I am open to persuasion.

I am not a biologist!

There is a PhD or 10 here, I think!

Just for clarity, I'm being extremely silly and facetious, arguing as if the colours were actually real. Pls ignore!