2/14 – Melissa A. Wilson, Arizona State University
CBQB Seminar
February 14, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Address
Chicago, IL
Calendar
Download iCal FileWatch this webinar live with Zoom>>
Speaker: Melissa A. Wilson
Associate Professor
Arizona State University
Title: The pregnancy pickle: Sex differences in human health and disease
Abstract:
Melissa Wilson is a computational evolutionary biologist whose main research interests include sex-biased biology and how this affects human health and disease. Atypical sex chromosome copy numbers occur frequently in humans (Turner Syndrome, individuals with a single X, occurs in 1/2500 live female births, and Klinefelter syndrome, XXY, occurs in 1/1000 males). The clinical consequences of sex chromosome copy variation is dramatically influenced by the evolutionary history of the human sex chromosomes. The Wilson lab is focusing on understanding the evolution of sex-linked gene content and how this contributes to human disease. In particular, the Wilson lab studies how to more accurately quantify variation on the sex chromosomes and how to conduct sex-stratified analyses. This work is being applied to study variation in human cancers and in the placenta. I will present research and theory connecting the intersecting evolution of sex chromosomes, the placenta, and pregnancy, and how those combine to result in sex differences in many human diseases . I will propose how changes in industrialized society (e.g., having fewer pregnancies, and potentially even that the age at first reproduction is later) may be exacerbating these sex differences. In particular, we hypothesize that, ancestrally, sex-specific immune modulation evolved to facilitate survival of the pregnant person in the presence of an invasive placenta and an immunologically challenging pregnancy – an idea we term the 'pregnancy compensation hypothesis' (PCH). Further, we propose that sex differences in immune function are mediated, at least in part, by the evolution of gene content and dosage on the sex chromosomes, and are regulated by reproductive hormones. Finally, we propose that changes in reproductive ecology in industrialized environments exacerbate these evolved sex differences, resulting in the increasing risk of autoimmune disease observed in females, and a counteracting reduction in diseases such as cancer that can be combated by heightened immune surveillance. The PCH generates a series of expectations that can be tested empirically and that may help to identify the mechanisms underlying sex differences in modern human diseases. We then start to dig into this hypothesis by studying patterns of X-inactivation across human placentas, where we investigate regional heterogeneity in chromosome and gene-specific inactivation.
Date posted
Feb 3, 2022
Date updated
Feb 3, 2022