This is the Guardian. For decades, scientists have been attempting to read the human genome, what makes each of us us in its entirety.

But there's been one mysterious piece that has stumped them until now.

The Y chromosome, one of the two sex chromosomes, has finally been fully sequenced.

So today we're diving deep into the fascinating story of the Y chromosome, to find out about its role in the body,

what we know about how it influences everything from male development, health and

fertility all the way to forensics, and why some scientists think one day it could disappear

altogether. From the Guardian I'm Madeline Finley and this is Science Weekly.

Mark Jubling, your professor of genetics at the University of Leicester and so tell me what you

make of these new studies finally fully sequencing the Y chromosome. How much of a

step forward is this? Well I think what they've done is something that people thought for a long time was impossible,

which is to determine the DNA sequence of this very difficult little chromosome. So the wide chromosome is small but it's full of

very weird and difficult knotty bits of DNA that have really resisted sequencing for a long time. So both of these studies have used

really new technologies to tackle that problem and although it's a great

achievement they don't actually tell us a huge amount that's totally new.

We had the picture before it was just kind of out of focus.

So if you like what these have done is it's a bit like turning on high definition TV and that you can suddenly

see absolutely everything in its gory details. Now before we get into why that has

been so difficult and more about the Y chromosome itself.

Perhaps you can go over some basics for me.

What are chromosomes exactly? What do they do?

Chromosomes are bits of DNA. So our DNA is what determines many of our features and

determines the proteins that are made in cells and so forth and it's information.

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