Developmental biologist Eric Lai, Ph.D., and his lab at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) have been studying hotbeds of biological conflict, except instead of battles between outside invaders and internal defenders, they've uncovered an evolutionary battle of the sexes fought using a group of recently emerged genes. This conflict between the X and Y chromosomes plays out in a hidden struggle between 'selfish' genetic actors and the small strands of RNA that keep them in check.
This colorful snapshot depicts sperm maturation in fruit fly testes. Credit: Eric Lai Lab, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
In a conversation that ranges from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll to Wile E. Coyote, Dr. Lai, an investigator at MSK's Sloan Kettering Institute, explains the research and its significance—and why it's happening at a cancer center in the first place.. In that way, they're reminiscent of other selfish factors, like transposons and viruses—whose main goal is to make more copies of themselves and spread those copies through the population. Obviously, in the past few years, we've become painfully aware of how harmful such entities can be, like the virus that underlies COVID-19. It's just not much appreciated that there are genes that basically function in a similar way.
How does this work? Most of the body's defense mechanisms work by distinguishing between self and not-self. And there are parts of viruses and transposons that look decidedly foreign. Now, while this is very good from the perspective of the self-serving gene, it's very bad for the population because you start running out of males really quickly.
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