It’s not just an opinion article. It’s a competent and comprehensive review of the state of the art in lepidopteran genomics (as Reviewer #1 put it). Huge shout-out to the whole community! Writing this together was a great and surprisingly smooth experience.

Celebrating 1000 lep genomes with @kaybiodiversity.bsky.social. One beer for every hundred genomes. Looking forward to celebrating 10k!

True. In N. guentheri, we found few males which seem to have the XX sex chromosome constitution - confirmed by PCR assay and cytogenetics.

Big thanks to all my co-authors, especially @rogervilalab.bsky.social and @phylomigrationlab.bsky.social, for helping us collect all the species (and teaching us how to tell them apart!). It wasn’t easy, and it took a long time… but it was totally worth it! 😆

Thanks for letting me know. I added working link to the end of the thread. For aficionados, while sex chromosomes may not break, they do fuse - creating multiple sex chromosome systems (WZ₁Z₂) in some species. :)

And since doi link does not work, try this one :) academic.oup.com/gbe/advance-...

Fragmented chromosomes have their telomeres restored, stabilizing them.
But more than that. Telomeres become hypertrophically enlarged, hinting at telomerase activity as a force constraining karyotype evolution in Lepidoptera.

We confirmed that high chromosome numbers come from fragmentation, not polyploidy. Intriguingly, their repeat-rich W chromosomes resist to fissions, presumably due to their epigenetic silencing. This is more general phenomenon as we observed it also in a pale tussock moth (Calliteara pudibunda).

Huge thanks to everyone involved in this multi-disciplinary effort! We celebrate tonight! 🥳🎉🥂

This helped us to reconstruct sex-linked genomic regions and infer their divergence. We found several sex-related genes on sex chromosomes, but no strong candidate for a master sex-determining gene.

We found at least four independent sex chromosome turnovers, all involving fusions between sex chromosomes and autosomes. To dig deeper, we sequenced draft genomes of F. thierryi and N. guentheri and analyzed population resequencing data.

We investigated multiple sex chromosome systems across African annual killifishes (Nothobranchius spp. & Fundulosoma thierryi) using cytogenetics and bioinformatics. We analyzed 6 species with X1X2Y sex chromosomes using comparative mapping by BAC-FISH and chromosome painting.

We do not mind. Nobody is perfect 😁

Do you have any good excuse not to go? :)