Molecular markers have been used to identify the sex of sampled individuals for several decades, but the time-consuming development phase prevented their application in many systems. Recently, a growing number of papers have applied reduced-representation sequencing (RRS) protocols to the identification of sex-specific markers without the use of test crosses or prior genomic information. While such an approach has great advantages in terms of versatility and ease of use, the "shotgun sequencing" nature of RRS data sets leads to a high amount of missing data, which results in statistical challenges to the confident assignment of sex to individuals. In this issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, Stovall et al. (Molecular Ecology Resources, 18, 2018) provide a statistical framework to answer two questions: (1) how many individuals of one sex only must possess a genotype for this locus to be considered significantly sex-specific? and (2) How many sex-specific loci must an individual of unknown sex possess (in a given data set) to be confidently assigned a sex? The statistical pipeline introduced, and applied to samples of New Zealand fur seal (Arctocephalus forsteri) to identify 90 sex-specific loci, should be broadly applicable to a large number of species and constitutes a nice addition to the molecular ecology toolkit in the genomics era.

中文翻译：

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让我们来谈谈性别：一个严格的统计框架，用于从缩减表示形式的测序数据中分配个体的性别。

分子标记已被用于识别被采样个体的性别已有数十年的历史，但是耗时的开发阶段阻碍了它们在许多系统中的应用。最近，越来越多的论文将减少表示法测序（RRS）协议应用于性别特异性标记的鉴定，而无需使用测试杂交或先前的基因组信息。尽管这种方法在通用性和易用性方面具有巨大优势，但是RRS数据集的“ shot弹枪排序”性质导致大量丢失数据，这给从性别上向个人自信地分配统计数据带来了挑战。在本期《分子生态资源》中，Stovall等人。（Molecular Ecology Resources，18，2018）提供了一个统计框架来回答两个问题：（1）多少个单一性别的个体必须具有基因型才能将该基因座视为具有明显性别特异性？（2）一个未知性别的个体（在给定的数据集中）必须拥有多少个特定性别的位点才能自信地分配性别？引入的统计流程已应用于新西兰海狗（Arctocephalus forsteri）的样本中，以识别90个性别特定的基因座，应该广泛适用于大量物种，并且构成了基因组学时代分子生态学工具包的一个不错的补充。