Evolution of sex chromosomes in Leucadendron
The question of how suppressed recombination evolves is a major gap in our knowledge about sex chromosomes and other supergenes. The diverse hypotheses regarding the drivers The iconic South African plant genus Leucadendron is fully dioecious and includes some of the most sexually dimorphic of all flowering plants. Our chromosome-scale genome assembly of L. rubrum provided fully contiguous X and Y haplotypes (Nanopore long-reads and Hi-C), which reveal the mutational steps taken during their formation in unprecedented detail. Furthermore, we re-sequenced males and females of 25 Leucadendron species (short-reads), and delimited non-recombining sex-linked genomic regions in each species separately.