Early embryology;sexing the brain (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 01, 2015, 15:04 (3524 days ago) @ David Turell

It is methylation in a pre-optic area in the female, with testosterone effects:-http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/42555/title/Female-Brain-Maintained-by-Methylation/-"Differences in male and female rodent sexual behaviors are programmed during brain development, but how exactly this occurs is not clear. In the preoptic area (POA) of the brain—a region necessary for male sex behavior—the female phenotype results from repression of male-linked genes by DNA methylation, according to a study published today (March 30) in Nature Neuroscience.-"There is very little known about how the brain is masculinized—and even less about how it is feminized—even though the question has been studied for more than 50 years, said Bridget Nugent, study author and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.-"These sex differences in the brain are programmed toward the end of fetal development, through to one week after birth in rodents. In males, testicular hormones drive masculinization of the brain; this was thought to occur by direct induction of gene expression by hormone-associated transcription factors. Because a feminized brain occurred in the absence of ovarian hormone signals, most researchers assumed that the female brain and behavior was a sort of default state, programmed during development when no male hormones are present. But the downstream mechanisms of how hormones can modify gene expression were not previously known.-"'This study reveals that DNA methylation plays an important role in regulating sexual differentiation,” said Nirao Shah, who also studies the neural basis for sex-specific behaviors at the University of California, San Francisco, but was not involved with the work."