<i>Maleness-on-the-Y</i> ( <i>MoY</i> ) orchestrates male sex determination in major agricultural fruit fly pests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In insects, rapidly evolving primary sex-determining signals are transduced by a conserved regulatory module producing sex-specific proteins that direct sex determination and sexual differentiation 1-4 . In the agricultural pest Ceratitis capitata (medfly), a Y-linked maleness factor ( M ) is thought to repress the autoregulatory splicing of transformer ( Cctra ), which is required in XX individuals to establish and maintain female sex determination 5,6 . Despite previous attempts of isolating Y-linked genes using the medfly whole genome, the M factor has remained elusive 7 . Here, we report the identification of a Y-linked gene, M aleness- o n the- Y ( MoY ), and show that it encodes a small novel protein which is both necessary and sufficient for medfly male sex determination. Transient silencing of MoY in XY individuals leads to the development of fertile females while transient expression of MoY in XX individuals results in fertile males. Notably, a cross between these sex reverted individuals gives rise to both fertile males and females indicating that a functional MoY can be maternally transmitted. In contrast to the diversity of M factors found in dipteran species 8-11 , we discovered MoY orthologues in seven other Tephritid species spanning ∼111 millions of years of evolution (Mya). We confirmed their male determining function in the olive fly ( Bactrocera oleae ) and the oriental fruit fly ( Bactrocera dorsalis ). This unexpected conservation of the primary MoY signal in a large number of important agricultural pests 12 will facilitate the development of transferable genetic control strategies in these species, for example sterile male releases or sex-ratio-distorting gene drives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".