About Alexandre Daly
Alexandre is currently pursuing a PhD in Human Genetics at the University of Michigan, with the goal of making science more accessible to non-scientists.

Slaying the X in the Fairer Sex

April 14, 2015 Alexandre Daly

In arguably the greatest feat of epigenetic orchestration, every single cell in female marsupial and eutherian mammals permanently silences an entire chromosome. While many studied instances of epigenetic regulation involve the repression of a handful of genes, the process of X chromosome inactivation (XCI) effectively silences a 900-gene chromosome over the course of several days and does so for the entire life of the organism (1)(2). The process of entirely yet exclusively silencing one of the largest chromosomes in the [more…]

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