Ectopic Gonads

Creatine metabolism and the gonads.

When Gonads Talk to the Heart

Cardiovascular risk is significantly lower in normally cycling women compared with men. This difference is abolished after menopause, suggesting a link with sex steroid hormones. Early studies on cardiac endocrine function disclosed higher natriuretic peptide concentrations in women than in men, suggesting the hypothesis that female sex steroid hormones could directly stimulate cardiomyocyte ho...

Mammalian sex determination: from gonads to brain.

In mammals, sex is determined by the Y chromosome, which encodes a testis-determining factor (TDF). This factor causes the undifferentiated embryonic gonads to develop as testes rather than ovaries. The testes subsequently produce the male sex hormones that are responsible for all male sexual characteristics. In 1990, the sex-determining gene, TDF, was identified and termed SRY in humans (Sry i...

RNA in situ hybridization of dissected gonads.

Copyright: © 2006 Min-Ho Lee and Tim Schedl. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected] RNA in situ hy...

Gonads and the evolution of hormonal phenotypes.

Hormones are dynamic signaling molecules that influence gene activity and phenotype, and they are thus thought to play a central role in phenotypic evolution. In vertebrates, many fitness-related traits are mediated by the hormone testosterone (T), but the mechanisms by which T levels evolve are unclear. Here, we summarize a series of studies that advance our understanding of these mechanisms b...