A female white campion - a model plant for evolutionary plant biology. (Image: Martin C. Fischer/ETH Zurich)
How the differences between the sexes evolve depends not only on which parts of the genome are sex-specifically active. The question also arises concerning the sex in which such changes take place. ETH researchers demonstrate this using a closely related pair of plants. Scientists have been asking a fundamental question ever since the time of Darwin: how do the different sexes evolve when the genes of females and males are for the most part the same? Take the example of humans: a small but obviously important genetic difference between women and men is that a man has a Y chromosome. His X chromosome, however, is identical to the woman's, who carries two copies of the X. And yet women and men differ in build and physiology. One reason is that many common genes are active depending on the specific sex. But how did it come to be that genes in both sexes exhibit different expression patterns' This evolution can no longer be studied in humans because it occurred far too long ago, but the same cannot be said of plants.
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