Susumu Ohno proposed in 1967 that, during the origin of mammalian sex chromosomes from a pair of autosomes, per-allele expression levels of X-linked genes were doubled to compensate for the degeneration of their Y homologs. This conjecture forms the foundation of the current evolutionary model of sex chromosome dosage compensation, but has been tested in mammals only indirectly via a comparison of expression levels between X-linked and autosomal genes in the same genome. The test results have been controversial, because examinations of different gene sets led to different conclusions that either support or refute Ohno’s hypothesis. Here we resolve this uncertainty by directly comparing mammalian X-linked genes with their one-to-one orthologs in species that diverged before the origin of the mammalian sex chromosomes. Analyses of RNA sequencing data and proteomic data provide unambiguous evidence for expression halving (i.e., no change in per-allele expression level) of X-linked genes during evolution, with the exception of only ∼5% of genes that encode members of large protein complexes. We conclude that Ohno’s hypothesis is rejected for the vast majority of genes, reopening the search for the evolutionary force driving the origin of chromosome-wide X inactivation in female mammals.

Nucleosome Maps and Mutation: Understanding the processes governing the accumulation of mutations impacts many facets of evolutionary biology. Combining data from a mutation accumulation experiment in a DNA repair-deficient yeast strain with genome-wide substitution, Chen et al. (p. 1235 ) demonstrate that C/G to T/A changes are more likely to affect regions that are nucleosome-free. Furthermore, a similar pattern was seen when comparative analyses were performed among yeast species and in lines of Medaka fish and nematodes. The results are consistent with a model in which DNA bound by nucleosomes is protected against mutations caused by DNA damage.

The essence of Darwin’s theory is that evolution is driven by purposeless mutations that are subsequently selected by natural environments, so there is often no predefined destination in organismal evolution. Using gene expressions of 107 cell types, we built a functional space of human cells to trace the evolutionary trajectory of 18 types of solid tumor cancers. We detected a dominant evolving trend toward the functional status of embryonic stem cells (ESC) for approximately 3,000 tumors growing in distinct tissue environments. This pattern remained the same after excluding known cancer/ESC signature genes (∼3,000 genes) or excluding all oncogenic gene sets (∼12,000 genes) annotated in MSigDB, suggesting a convergent evolution of the overall functional status in cancers. In support of this, the functional distance to ESC served as a common prognostic indicator for cancers of various types, with shorter distance corresponding to poor prognosis, which was true even when randomly selected gene sets were considered. Thus, regardless of the external environments, cancer evolution is a directional process toward a defined cellular destination, a finding reconciling development and evolution, the two seemingly incompatible philosophies both adopted by the cancer research community, and also raising new questions to evolutionary biology.