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Apart form its long-known role of reversing the default state of being female, the Y chromosome also carries genes required for the general operation of the genome, according to two new studies. 

According to a study, the genes may represent a fundamental difference in how the cells in men's and women's bodies read off the information in their genomes. 

In their first analysis of the genetic content of the Y chromosome, researchers found that it had shed hundreds of genes over time which somehow explained why it was so much shorter than its partner, the X chromosome. 

However an analysis in 2012 proved that the rhesus monkey's Y chromosome had essentially the same number of genes as the human Y, suggesting that Y had stabilized and ceased to lose genes for the last 25 million years - the interval since the two species diverged from a common ancestor. 

Two new surveys have now reconstructed the full history of the Y chromosome back to its evolutionary origin. One research group was led by Daniel W. Bellott and David C. Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and the other by Diego Cortez and Henrik Kaessmann of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, according to New York Times. 

"Throughout human bodies, the cells of males and females are biochemically different," Dr. Page said in the press release. 

Often it is the difference between male and female tissues that is credited to the powerful influence of the sex hormones. However, after having known the fact that the 12 regulatory genes are active throughout the body, there is clearly an intrinsic difference in male and female cells even before the sex hormones are brought into play. 

"We are only beginning to understand the full extent of the differences in molecular biology of males and females," Andrew Clark, a geneticist at Cornell University, wrote in a commentary in Nature on the two reports.