What Cinnamon and his team determined revolves around the common denominator of all male chickens, the Z chromosome from the mother hen.
This would also be a common denominator with the female chickens. Birds, unlike mammals, use the ZW sex-chromosome system, where males have the symmetric ZZ chromosomes and females have a pair of asymmetric ZW chromosomes.
I'd like to know more about this, such as a general description of what kind of change they made, as this article is really light on technical details.
The maternal Z is not a common denominator of female chickens. Female chickens have a Z chromosome from the sperm and males have one each from the sperm and the egg. For a laying hen to have a female offspring, it has to pass on a W. Therefore, if you make the mother hen's ovary produce eggs with a lethal z, but a non-lethal W, normal sperm will produce viable ZW females and Zz males with a lethal mutation.
Comments
This would also be a common denominator with the female chickens. Birds, unlike mammals, use the ZW sex-chromosome system, where males have the symmetric ZZ chromosomes and females have a pair of asymmetric ZW chromosomes.
I'd like to know more about this, such as a general description of what kind of change they made, as this article is really light on technical details.
The maternal Z is not a common denominator of female chickens. Female chickens have a Z chromosome from the sperm and males have one each from the sperm and the egg. For a laying hen to have a female offspring, it has to pass on a W. Therefore, if you make the mother hen's ovary produce eggs with a lethal z, but a non-lethal W, normal sperm will produce viable ZW females and Zz males with a lethal mutation.
IIRC, this is why birds can undergo parthenogenesis in rare cases.
I don't know about "why". It seems like it would be slightly easier with the same chromosomes. And it happens with both systems.
If you specifically mean parthenogenesis to a male egg, then yes you'd generally need something like ZW.