London Research Institute Milestone 11 Why can’t a woman be more like a man? The race for the male sex-determining gene • 1990: Peter Goodfellow’s lab show that the testis-determining factor, which specifies maleness, is encoded by the SRY gene. Background As is well known, humans normally have 46 chromosomes, comprising 22 pairs of autosomes and 1 pair of sex chromosomes, XX for females, and XY for males. It seems hard to believe now, but the Y chromosome’s function as a determinant of maleness has only been known since 1959, with the discovery of men with chromosome complement 47XXY, and women who were 45XO. The presence of a Y chromosome overrides any number of X chromosomes, and is necessary and sufficient for testis development and maleness. But what was it on the Y chromosome that specified maleness? By painstaking analysis of patients with jumbled sex chromosomes lacking pieces of Y, or where the X and Y had managed to mix together, scientists were able to narrow the region containing the so-called Testis Determining Factor (TDF) to a chunk of the Y-specific part of the Y chromosome, near the boundary with the pseudoautosomal region (the part of the Y chromosome which is able to pair with the X). But this still meant that many hundreds of thousands of base pairs of DNA had to be searched for the TDF gene. Peter Goodfellow, fanatical Arsenal fan, sometime poet, and all round eccentric, was recruited by Walter Bodmer in 1979, in his drive to bring human genetics to the ICRF. Peter’s expertise lay in gene mapping, pinpointing genes in the vast human genome, at that time a complicated and esoteric procedure. He had started his career mapping components of the immune system as a PhD student with Walter Bodmer in Oxford, and, after a postdoc at Stanford (during which he attended the last Sex Pistols concert and had the honour of being spat on by Sid Vicious), he started a lab at the ICRF to do the same thing for genes encoding tumour-specific antigens. By coincidence, one of these mapped very near the putative TDF locus. The unsolved problem of male sex determination sparked Peter’s interest, and, equipped as he was with the expertise to find genetic needles in genomic haystacks, he decided to identify and clone the elusive TDF gene. The research Things progressed very well to begin with. The Goodfellow lab’s advanced methodologies allowed them to produce a very good genetic roadmap of the TDF region, and in 1987, they published a paper in Nature which narrowed down the region to be searched to a manageable 50 - 150 kilobase (50,000 - 150,000 basepair) piece of DNA abutting the pseudoautosomal boundary, containing a candidate locus for the TDF gene. Then, what looked like disaster struck; the nightmare of every scientist working on a hot problem is to be scooped by the competition, and, in a Cell paper in 1987, David Page, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, announced the cloning and sequencing of the gene corresponding to Peter’s candidate locus. This gene, which Page called ZFY, was claimed, with much trumpeting, to be the long-awaited TDF. After some time spent sitting under his desk writing poetry and drinking too much coffee, Peter emerged to continue working. The Page paper had not truly nailed the problem, and unequivocal evidence that ZFY was indeed the TDF was still lacking. Rumours began to circulate in the sex determination field that Page had got it wrong. To be the TDF, ZFY had to fulfil a number of criteria. The first, that it should be on the Y-specific part of the Y chromosome, was clearly fine, and that it appeared to be the only gene in a rather empty area of DNA was also in its favour. However, one significant problem was that the X chromosome carried a highly homologous gene, called ZFX. This was rather odd, as the two genes were so closely related that it would be hard for them to have different functions, as they must if ZFY, but not ZFX, determined maleness. Secondly, both Page and Goodfellow contacted an Australian expert on marsupial genetics, Jenny Graves, and asked her to probe the marsupial genome to check that marsupial Zfy was also on the Y chromosome. To everyone’s surprise, it was not; it lay on an autosome, which was very unexpected, as maleness in marsupials is also specified by the presence of a Y chromosome. This was a significant nail in the coffin, but ZFY’s short life as the TDF truly ended after the Christmas 1989 edition of Nature, which carried two papers, one from Peter’s lab together with the Fellous lab in Paris, and one from Peter’s collaborator Robin Lovell-Badge; the first described a number of sex-reversed XX men whose genomes did not contain Peter Goodfellow 38 London Research Institute 1902-2014 ZFY, and the second showed that murine Zfy was not found in the cells specifying maleness. The race was back on again, and this time, the Goodfellow lab won. Andrew Sinclair, the PhD student in Jenny Graves’s lab who had shown that marsupial Zfy was autosomal, moved to London to do a postdoc with Peter, and in 1990, was first author on a Nature paper describing the positional cloning and correct identification of SRY as the gene for determining maleness. The SRY gene was 150kb away from ZFY, and had been missed before because it was tiny, a mere 1000 bases long. SRY was subjected to the same scrutiny as ZFY, but passed with flying colours. The Goodfellow lab published another paper using the Fellous lab’s clinical material, showing that the three XX men described in the 1989 paper had picked up the part of the Y chromosome containing SRY; and as final proof that SRY was the real deal, Peter published yet another paper in Nature in 1991 with Robin Lovell-Badge, showing that female mice engineered to carry the SRY gene developed as males. This latter paper, with its memorable front cover image of Randy the sex-reversed mouse, caused a media storm at the time, and with its appearance, signalled an end to one of the highest profile scientific races ever. The consequences SRY proved to be a difficult protein to study. After many years of effort, we now know that it is a rather weedy transcription factor, whose sole purpose as a testis determining factor is to switch on a second gene, SOX9 (also cloned in Peter’s laboratory), which then does all the rest of the work in establishing maleness. Interestingly, SOX9 is an autosomal gene, and appears to be a much more ancient specifier of maleness than SRY; it exists in multiple non-mammalian species, in contrast to SRY, which is solely mammalian. In a recent twist to the story, the long-held dogma that femaleness was a default state, and to be male one simply had to activate SRY and SOX9, was overturned in 2009 by Robin Lovell-Badge in a collaborative study which showed that in mice the autosomal gene FoxL2 specifies femaleness, and when present, overrides Sox9 and prevents ovaries changing into testes. Loss of FoxL2 in adult female mice upregulates Sox9, causing reprogramming of some ovarian cell types to those found in testes. Remarkably, as in life, the Sox9/FoxL2 story shows that maleness and femaleness appear to be established by what some might view as a balancing act, and others as a war. What happened next? In 1992, the flamboyance quotient of the ICRF was reduced to a depressingly normal level when Peter Goodfellow moved to the University of Cambridge to become the Balfour Professor of Genetics. He still carries the distinction of being the only head of the Cambridge University Science Department to have a ponytail. He left academia to become Senior Vice President at Smith Kline Beecham in 1996, and became Senior VP, Discovery Research upon Smith Kline’s merger with Glaxo in 2001. He remained at Glaxo Smith Kline until his retirement in 2006, and now acts as a biotech consultant. His work on sex determination won him the 1995 Louis-Jeantet Prize, which he shared with Robin LovellBadge and three others, and, with Lovell-Badge and David Page, London Research Institute 1902-2014 39 the 1997 Francis Amory Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1992, and in 1998, became a founding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Key references* The sex-determining region of the human Y chromosome encodes a finger protein. Page DC, Mosher R, Simpson EM, Fisher EM, Mardon G, Pollack J, McGillivray B, de la Chapelle A, Brown LG. Cell 1987 51:1092-1104. Sequences homologous to ZFY, a candidate human sexdetermining gene, are autosomal in marsupials. Sinclair AH, Foster JW, Spencer JA, Page DC, Palmer M, Goodfellow PN, Graves JA. Nature. 1988 336:780-3. A gene from the human sex-determining region encodes a protein with homology to a conserved DNA-binding motif. Sinclair AH, Berta P, Palmer MS, Hawkins JR, Griffiths BL, Smith MJ, Foster JW, Frischauf AM, Lovell-Badge R, Goodfellow PN. Nature. 1990 346:240-4. Genetic evidence equating SRY and the testis-determining factor. Berta P, Hawkins JR, Sinclair AH, Taylor A, Griffiths BL, Goodfellow PN, Fellous M. Nature.1990 348:448-50. Male development of chromosomally female mice transgenic for Sry. Koopman P, Gubbay J, Vivian N, Goodfellow P, Lovell-Badge R. Nature. 1991 351:117-21. Somatic sex reprogramming of adult ovaries to testes by FOXL2 ablation. Uhlenhaut NH, Jakob S, Anlag K, Eisenberger T, Sekido R, Kress J, Treier AC, Klugmann C, Klasen C, Holter NI, Riethmacher D, Schütz G, Cooney AJ, Lovell-Badge R, Treier M. Cell. 2009 139:1130-42. The Exception That Proves the Rule: An Interview with Jenny Graves. Jane Gitschier. PLoS Genet. 2008 4: e1000063. *LRI scientists shown in bold Sex reversal in mice: a chromosomally-female (XX) mouse carrying the Sry gene grows as a male with testes. This mouse is a product of research led jointly by Robin Lovell-Badge of the Medical Research Council & Peter Goodfellow of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund.
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