Sex in Dragons: the molecular basis of genetic and environmental sex determination. (Administered by ANU)

How animals determine sex has been debated over decades. Particularly mysterious is that sex is determined by genes in some animals, and by temperature in others. We will study closely related dragon lizards which determine sex via gene (GSD) or temperature (TSD). We will use novel genetic, molecular and cytological approaches to discover genes and chromosomes that control sex determination in the GSD species, and explore their homologues in the TSD species. We expect this study will provide new insights to mechanisms of sex determination in all vertebrates, and demonstrate how genes and the environmnet interact to control the process