Prevalence of sexual dimorphism in mammalian phenotypic traits

Resource type: Publication Publication
  • Authors
    Karp, N. A., Mason, J., Beaudet, A. L., Benjamini, Y., Bower, L., Braun, R. E., Brown, S. D., Chesler, E. J., Dickinson, M. E., Flenniken, A. M., Fuchs, H., Angelis, M. H., Gao, X., Guo, S., Greenaway, S., Heller, R., Herault, Y., Justice, M. J., Kurbatova, N., . . . White, J. K
  • Type
    Original research
  • Journal
    Nature Communications
  • Publication Date
    2017
  • Abstract

    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.

Access Publication

Role of sex as a modifier of a genotype–phenotype relationship: One of the first papers showing the role of sex in explaining variation in phenotypes of wildtype mice as assessed using data from the IMPC with all data freely available at mousephenotype.org. Furthermore, as a mediator of a mutant phenotype, sex modifies the genotype effect in 13.3% of qualitative data sets and up to 17.7% of quantitative data sets.