Thank you Crowdfunders!

Hi Everyone,

Thank you so much for your support

You were all featured in an article about the whole crowd-funding process just before COVID-19 hit. It features a huge thank you to all of our wonderful supporters, suggestions for other scientists on how to get their own research funded, and, of course, a highlight of the Gila monster:

 https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-019-1864-3 

Since that article was published, our lab shut down, everyone has been working from home, and while we've been able to find a new normal, I admit that it has been slower than I would like. For that, I sincerely apologize to you all.

Now that we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, we're also finalizing this project that we all love so much. Some sneak peeks for you all, while we finalize this!!

1. The genome of the Gila monster has been assembled. This means that we have the strings of A's, T's, G's, and C's for the Gila monster genome. But we don't know which parts of those strings of letters code for the functional regions. The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has a process that will help us identify those regions, and the Gila monster genome is currently in the process of being annotated at NCBI.

2. We have identified sex chromosomes! This is truly exciting for me (a sex chromosome researcher). We found four different scaffolds (pieces of the Gila monster genome) that show a signature consistent with being sex chromosomes. That is, they look to have just a single copy in females and two copies in males. Gila monster sex chromosomes are just the opposite of humans (where genetic females have two copies of the X chromosome, and genetic males have just one). So, this is pretty cool.

3. We are also working on studying whether there is something called dosage compensation on the Gila monster sex chromosomes. Back to copy number (females have one Z sex chromosome and males have two Z sex chromosomes), which means that there are a lot of different ways that the genes on these sex chromosomes could be expressed. In humans, with our X chromosomes, there is type of dosage compensation that results in equal dosage on the X chromosome between males and females, and between the X chromosome and the non-sex chromosomes. What we're finding so far is that it looks like Gila monsters do *not* have the same kind of dosage compensation as in humans, meaning that there may be some big differences between males and females in the expression of genes on their Z chromosome.

I hope you are all staying safe and well. Thank you for your support!

Sincerely,

Melissa and the Gila monster research team