RT @birdGRC_: Thanks all the amazing people involved in this collaborative work including @yfpei, @alexander_suh and others not in Twitter….

Nevertheless, we @fjruizruano @alexander_suh found the GRC and the mtDNA trees from 9 different families do not match. This suggests that in the evolutionary past one GRC might spread the zebra finch population, crossing matriline boundaries via occasional paternal inheritance.

The GRC was previously believed to be only inherited from the mothers, due to its expulsion from sperm. In our study, in addition to our observation of GRC-carrying sperm, we also found a hybrid zebra finch that got his GRC from one of the paternal generations.

Male zebra finches from two different families that we studied consistently differed in their fractions of GRC-carrying sperm, i.e. 1% for brothers from family A versus 9% for brothers from family B. This suggests a potentially simple genetic or epigenetic cause.

All songbirds process a GRC, which is only exist in testes in males and ovaries in females, but is absent from all other tissues like muscle and brain. The GRC was documented to be always expelled from sperm. However, we found that 1%-19% of sperm still carried a GRC.

Hi I’m a PhD student from Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. I’m excited to share our findings published at With @fjruizruano @alexander_suh et al. we found the songbird germline-restricted chromosome (GRC) can occasionally be inherited from the father

RT @MPIforBI: Songbirds have an extra chromosome that was believed to be maternally inherited. A team led by Bart Kempenaers & @alexander_s….