Format: ORAL

Alex Harkess

HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology

Sex chromosomes have evolved hundreds, if not thousands, of independent times across flowering plants. However, only a small number of master sex determination genes have been identified, largely due to a lack of high quality genomic resources for complex plant genomes that contain sex chromosomes. We have built computational pipelines for 1) assessing if a species has XY or ZW sex chromosomes, 2) assembling highly contiguous and fully-phased sex chromosome assemblies in heterogametic sexes, 3) delimiting the non-recombining sex determination region on these sex chromosomes, and 4) exploring the evolution of these regions in diverse plant species to identify putative sex determination genes in non-model plants. We use these computational tools to explore the repeated evolution of sex chromosomes in flowering plants, which is uncovering a hidden world of sex chromosome variation within and among species.