Prevalence of sexual dimorphism in mammalian phenotypic traits

Natasha Karp (1, 2) , Jeremy Mason (3) , Arthur Beaudet (4) , Yoav Benjamini (5) , Lynette Bower (6) , Robert Braun (7) , Steve Brown (8) , Elissa Chesler (7) , Mary Dickinson (4) , Ann Flenniken , Helmut Fuchs (9) , Martin Hrabe de Angelis (9, 10, 11) , Xiang Gao (12) , Shiying Guo (12) , Simon Greenaway (8) , Ruth Heller (5) , Yann Herault (13, 14, 15) , Monica Justice (16) , Natalja Kurbatova (5) , Christopher Lelliott (1) , K Lloyd (6) , Ann-Marie Mallon (8) , Judith Mank (17) , Hiroshi Masuya (18) , Colin Mckerlie (16) , Terrence Meehan (3) , Richard Mott (17) , Stephen Murray (7) , Helen Parkinson (3) , Ramiro Ramirez-Solis (1) , Luis Santos (8) , John Seavitt (4) , Damian Smedley (19) , Tania Sorg-Guss (13, 14, 15) , Anneliese Speak (1) , Karen Steel (1, 20) , Karen Svenson (7) , Shigeharu Wakana (18) , David West (21) , Sara Wells (8) , Henrik Westerberg (8) , Shay Yaacoby (5) , Jacqueline White (7, 1)

1 The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute [Cambridge]
2 AstraZeneca [Cambridge, UK]
3 EMBL-EBI - European Bioinformatics Institute [Hinxton]
4 BCM - Baylor College of Medicine
5 TAU - Tel Aviv University
6 UC Davis - University of California [Davis]
7 JAX - The Jackson Laboratory [Bar Harbor]
8 MRC Harwell Institute [UK]
9 Helmholtz Zentrum München = German Research Center for Environmental Health
10 TUM - Technische Universität Munchen - Technical University Munich - Université Technique de Munich
11 DZD - German Center for Diabetes Research - Deutsches Zentrum für Diabetesforschung [Neuherberg]
12 NJU - Nanjing University
13 IGBMC - Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire
14 PHENOMIN - French National Infrastructure for Mouse Phenogenomics
15 ICS - Institut Clinique de la Souris
16 SickKids - The Hospital for sick children [Toronto]
17 UCL - University College of London [London]
18 RIKEN BRC - RIKEN BioResource Research Center [Tsukuba, Japan]
19 QMUL - Queen Mary University of London
20 King‘s College London
21 Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute (CHORI)

The role of sex in biomedical studies has often been overlooked, despite evidence of sexually dimorphic effects in some biological studies. Here, we used high-throughput phenotype data from 14,250 wildtype and 40,192 mutant mice (representing 2,186 knockout lines), analysed for up to 234 traits, and found a large proportion of mammalian traits both in wildtype and mutants are influenced by sex. This result has implications for interpreting disease phenotypes in animal models and humans.

Domaines: Génétique

Natasha Karp, Jeremy Mason, Arthur Beaudet, Yoav Benjamini, Lynette Bower, et al.. Prevalence of sexual dimorphism in mammalian phenotypic traits. Nature Communications, 2017, 8, ⟨10.1038/ncomms15475⟩. ⟨hal-03679179⟩