ven. 20 giugno 2003
“…Dr Graves had thus predicted that the chromosome might be heading for extinction within five to 10 million years.
But Page says that the Y’s full genome sequence has revealed that scientists generally had underestimated both its number of genes and its powers of self-preservation.
The team believes the Y has developed an apparently unique way of pairing up with itself. They found that many of its 50 million DNA “letters” occur in sequences known as palindromes. Like their grammatical counterparts, these sequences of letters read the same forward as backward but are arranged in opposite directions – like a mirror image – on both strands of the DNA double helix. This means that a back-up copy of each of the genes they contain occurs at each end of the sequence.”
vedi: http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s884493.htm
Se la scoperta è attendibile, possiamo stare tranquilli: il povero cromosoma Y non ha milioni di anni contati, come temevamo fino a ieri, non solo, ma è una splendida galleria di specchi (palindromi).
Meno male.