The evolution of sex-biased genes and sex-biased gene expression

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Abstract
Sexual dimorphism in gene expression is widespread across organisms and genomes. Genes with sex-biased expression, especially those with male-biased expression, tend to evolve rapidly in both protein sequence and expression level. Sex-biased genes are non-randomly distributed in the genome, with examples of both under-representation and over-representation on the X chromosome. There is mounting evidence that positive selection is the driving force behind the rapid evolution of sex-biased genes. This is probably caused by sexual selection and antagonistic coevolution between the sexes. Sex-linked genes that escape dosage compensation constitute a special case of sex-biased gene expression. There are several scenarios for the origin of sex-biased genes, including single-locus antagonism, sexual antagonism plus gene duplication and duplication of sex-biased genes.