Monday, 6 July 2009
Another Part of the Puzzle
Zoe Brain
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2009/07/another-part-of-puzzle.html (http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2009/07/another-part-of-puzzle.html)
We now have even more evidence that hormonal environment in the womb, and chromosomal complexes play parallel but distinct roles in somatic development. And part of that somatic development is the development of gender, as opposed to just genitalia.
Disorders of sex development expose transcriptional autonomy of genetic sex and androgen-programmed hormonal sex in human blood leukocytes : Paul-Martin Holterhus, Jan-Hendrik Bebermeier, Ralf Werner, Janos Demeter, Annette Richter-Unruh, Gunnar Cario, Mahesh Appari, Reiner Siebert, Felix Riepe, James D Brooks and Olaf Hiort BMC Genomics 2009, 10:292
Gender appears to be determined by independent programs controlled by the sex-chromosomes and by androgen-dependent programming during embryonic development. To enable experimental dissection of these components in the human, we performed genome-wide profiling of the transcriptomes of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) in patients with rare defined "disorders of sex development" (DSD, e.g., 46,XY-females due to defective androgen biosynthesis) compared to normal 46,XY-males and 46,XX-females.