#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

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