X-inactivation

X-inactivation (also called Lyonization, after English geneticist Mary Lyon) is a process by which one of the copies of the X chromosome is inactivated in therian female mammals. The inactive X chromosome is silenced by being packaged into a transcriptionally inactive structure called heterochromatin. As nearly all female mammals have two X chromosomes, X-inactivation prevents them from having twice as many X chromosome gene products as males, who only possess a single copy of the X chromosome (see dosage compensation). The choice of which X chromosome will be inactivated in a particular embryonic cell is random in placental mammals such as humans, but once an X chromosome is inactivated it will remain inactive throughout the lifetime of the cell and its descendants in the organism (its cell line). The result is that the choice of inactivated X chromosome in all the cells of the organism is a random distribution, often with about half the cells having the paternal X chromosome inactivated and half with an inactivated maternal X chromosome; but commonly, X-inactivation is unevenly distributed across the cell lines within one organism (skewed X-inactivation). Unlike the random X-inactivation in placental mammals, inactivation in marsupials applies exclusively to the paternally-derived X chromosome. The paragraphs below have to do only with rodents and do not reflect XI in the majority of mammals. X-inactivation is part of the activation cycle of the X chromosome throughout the female life. The egg and the fertilized zygote initially use maternal transcripts, and the whole embryonic genome is silenced until zygotic genome activation. Thereafter, all mouse cells undergo an early, imprinted inactivation of the paternally-derived X chromosome in 4–8 cell stage embryos. The extraembryonic tissues (which give rise to the placenta and other tissues supporting the embryo) retain this early imprinted inactivation, and thus only the maternal X chromosome is active in these tissues.