sex chromosome
1
3.7
- noun
- /sɛks ˈkrɒməsəʊm/
- Specialized
:
cromosoma sexual
- Fausto-Sterling defines all sex chromosome complements other than XX or XY as intersex.
- female sex chromosome
- male sex chromosomes
- one sex chromosome
Examples
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Each of us has two copies of our genes, because (with the exception of the sex chromosomes of males), we carry two of each chromosome.
Academic text (2017) -
And that's me speaking as a member of a species that has sex chromosomes!
Blog text (20) -
Consider, for instance, the fact that the sex chromosomes of birds function like a mirror image of our own.
Academic text (2002) -
But before there were sex chromosomes, there was sex and there were evolutionary dynamics.
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And that is what would happen if you were doing a cross and the allele that you were studying happened to be on a sex chromosome instead of one of these.
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In four entire sections from two other patients, none of the 493 CD45 cells with two distinct sex chromosomes was maternal.
Academic text (2003) -
During the first cell division, all three sex chromosomes get duplicated, but one of each triplet gets randomly left out when they pair up for separation into the two daughter cells.
Blog text (8) -
Several years ago, a postdoc in my lab got interested in sex chromosome dosage compensation in the early fly embryo and planned to use genome-wide mRNA abundance measurements in male and female embryos to study it.
Blog text (21) -
In humans, the sex chromosomes determine whether the individual will be male or female.
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The combination of the sex chromosomes from each parent leads to the biological sex of the offspring.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning of 'sex chromosome' is directly compositional: 'sex' specifies the semantic domain (male/female) and 'chromosome' names the biological structure, so together they denote a chromosome related to sex. This noun+noun compound follows a regular, cross-linguistically common pattern and would be understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
Sex chromosome is the name for a special chromosome, a small packet of genetic 'instructions' that carries information about sex. So the term means the chromosome that helps 'decide' whether an individual becomes 'male' or 'female'.