#gonad

Anonymous said to @ask-drferox: How would one tell the difference, on examination, between an undescended testicle and an ovary in a hermaphroditic cat? Is it obvious?

From the outside of the cat, you often have no clue what the gonads are unless you’re going to go ahead with an ultrasound scan, and the situations in which you’d do this are pretty rare. You might have an ultrasound performed in an infertility investigation, but honestly it’s pretty rare as if a tom doesn’t have both testicles present and correct where they should be on the outside, he shouldn’t be bred from. Cryptorchidism is genetic.

Most of the time an intersex animal (and i encourage you to use the term intersex, as it’s more current, more polite, and trying to classify individuals as hermaphrodites/pseudo-hermaphrodites/chimeras/masculinised-female etc is confusing, academic at best, and something of a waste of time in clinical practice) is discovered at the time of desexing.

If the gonad is in the scrotum, it’s a almost certainly a testicle. It might not be a completely normal testicle, but it still counts for the remainder of its brief existence. Likewise with gonads located in the groin or inguinal ring, as ovaries don’t tend to move that much.

A gonad which resided inside the abdomen is usually an ovary, but occasional intersex individuals will have internal testicles, or nothing, or one of each, or a pair of ovo-testes.

When you actually have the organ within your fingers, it’s not that hard to tell what you’ve got. Testes actually have a fairly defined structure with central fibrous tissue that radiates outwards, like the inside of a kiwi fruit. The ovaries are not as structured but are kind of grape-like when they get follicles.

So the normal organs do look very different to each other. The abnormal organs still are usually recognizable by how they are structured, just kind of small and empty.

Stemming Stem Cells

Stem cells are essential for complex life. These immortal cells – found in embryos and adults – keep on dividing long after other cells have stopped, making more of themselves and generating specialised cells that make up the tissues of the body. But while it’s vital that stem cells can keep on multiplying, it’s also important that they don’t grow out of control and become a cancerous tumour. To find out how stem cells maintain this precarious balance, researchers are studying these snake-like sex organs (gonads) in tiny nematode worms called C. elegans. The brightly coloured patches are two proteins – SYGL-1 (pink) and LST-1 (orange) – which help stem cells maintain their immortal character. By limiting the area in which these proteins are active, the worms ensure that the pool of stem cells stays small. Maybe similar mechanisms are at work in our own bodies to keep our unruly stem cells in check?

Written by Kat Arney

Image by H. Shin and K. Haupt

Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)

Research published in PLOS Genetics, December 2017

Tens of thousands of young women choose to freeze eggs every year. The number is increasing as more Americans postpone their fertility. But there are many unknown people: What are the best donors for freezing? What is the success rate? And critical: How long does the frozen egg last? Answer of these questions can be more difficult to find. The Trump administration abolished the federal research…

Hücrelerin Radyasyona Karşı Duyarlığı Nasıldır?

HÜCRELERİN RADYASYONA KARŞI DUYARLILIK

( Bölünen hücreler radyasyona karşı daha hassastır.) • Beyaz kan hücreleri (Lenfositler) • Kırmızı kan hücreleri (Eritrositler) • Sindirim sistemi hücreleri • Üreme organı hücreleri • Cilt hücreleri • Kan damarları • Doku hücreleri (Kemik ve Sinir Sistemi)

Radyasyona Karşı Doku ve Organ Duyarlılığı

• Karaciğer, böbrek, kas, kemik, kıkırdak ve bağ dokuları yetişkin…

Abstract

This study used Littoraria scabra as a research model of reproductive strategy and attempted to understand how the species optimize their survival in mangrove area. It was aimed at investigating the reproductive strategy of ovoviviparous L. scabra in order to maintain their survival in mangrove ecosystem. Reproductive strategy observations of L. scabra were done by looking at mating, gonad maturity index, and sex ratio. Results showed that the reproductive strategy of L. scabra was as follows: a) there were 64.58% of mating pairs on the stem of S. ovata and b) sex ratio was globally significant different, but it was generally nonsignificant on monthly basis. Specific strategy of ovoviviparous species L. scabra with reproductive patterns, i.e mating, gonad maturity, and sex ratio was to optimize their reproductive success in extreme three-dimensional mangrove habitat. This study concluded that the reproductive strategy uniqueness of male L. scabra possessed fertilized eggs and very rare brooding system in male body and quickly released larvae.

Get the original articles in Source: Reproductive strategy uniqueness of Littoraria scabra (Gastropoda: Littorinidae), in Tombariri mangrove, North Sulawesi, Indonesia

Related Post: Diversity of the insects in the diet of edible nest swiftlets in oil palm plantations – JBES

Journal Name: Journal of Biodiversity and Environmental Sciences (JBES)

Published By: International Network for Natural Sciences