New steps in the meiosis chromosome dance

Where would we be without meiosis and recombination? For a start, none of us sexually reproducing organisms would be here, because that's how sperm and eggs are made. And when meiosis doesn't work properly, it can lead to ...

Sex, genes, the Y chromosome and the future of men

The Y chromosome, that little chain of genes that determines the sex of humans, is not as tough as you might think. In fact, if we look at the Y chromosome over the course of our evolution we've seen it shrink at an alarming ...

The story of X -- evolution of a sex chromosome

(PhysOrg.com) -- Move over, Y chromosome - it's time X got some attention. In the first evolutionary study of the chromosome associated with being female, University of California, Berkeley, biologist Doris Bachtrog and her ...

Ovaries must suppress their inner male

For an ovary to remain an ovary, the female organ has to continuously suppress its inner capacity to become male. That's the conclusion of a study in the December 11th issue of the journal Cell revealing that the ovaries ...

How Earth's oddest mammal got to be so bizarre

Often considered the world's oddest mammal, Australia's beaver-like, duck-billed platypus exhibits an array of bizarre characteristics: it lays eggs instead of giving birth to live babies, sweats milk, has venomous spurs ...

Favoring female flowers in hemp horticulture

A UConn plant science professor working with hemp plants has developed a way to maximize the production of female flowers, which produce significantly higher quantities of cannabinoids than male flowers.

How birds become male or female, and occasionally both

The highly unusual "semi-identical" Australian twins reported last week are the result of a rare event. It's thought the brother and sister (who have identical genes from their mother but not their father) developed from ...

page 1 from 12