Musings of a BIOL463 Student

This article is about a study which turned female rats into rats with male reproductive behaviour. They injected dmnts inhibitors to reduce the amount of DNA silencing through methylation and saw that newborn treated females would later develop to have male sexual behaviours. This is quite interesting as we talked about how in class we learned about Xist and how Fukuda et al. showed that removing H3K9me3 would make the Xm chromosome act like an Xp chromosome. In this study, they removed DNA methylation through reduction of dmnt activity. Likewise, male behaviour was observed. Epigenetics seems to play a big role in gender determination. This may lead to an explanation of why some people feel trapped inside the wrong body.