Figure 4.

Z chromosome gene expression become more male-biased over time. We show male-to-female gene expression ratio along the Z chromosomes of four species that represent the major avian clades. We used the published microarray data of chicken and zebra finch, and RNA-seq data of ostrich and emu. Given the difference of data scale, we present them in log or non-log based ratio. We color-coded the different evolutionary strata, with PAR or S3 in green, S2 in orange, S1 in yellow and S0 in blue. We also marked the putative male-determining genes DMRT1 with red dotted line in each species. Except for chicken, the other three species show a significantly higher male-biased expression in the older strata, as shown in the boxplots. We marked the non-coding RNA gene MHM [28,69] that mediates regional dosage compensation in chicken with green dotted line. Each box is compared to the younger one adjacent to it; the one with significant difference is shown with an asterisk at the bottom. The level of significance: ^*:P < 0.05; ^**:P < 0.01; ^***:P < 0.001.