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Relation between Polyploidy and the Amounts of Deoxynucleic Acid per Nucleus in the Liver and Kidney of Adult Rats

Abstract

THE nuclei of the livers of rats vary greatly in size, and it was found1,2 that the nuclear volumes formed a geometric series of type 1, 2, 4. Beams and King3 showed that the doubling of the nuclear volumes was due to polyploidy, so that within the cells of the liver there were nuclei which contained the diploid, tetraploid or octoploid number of chromosomes. In the liver of the adult rat, 70–80 per cent of the nuclei were tetraploid, and almost all the nuclei in the remaining 20–30 per cent were diploid with only a few per cent octoploid1,2. Mirsky and Ris4 demonstrated that in tissues the deoxynucleic acid was situated in the chromosomes, and it was suggested that the amount of deoxynucleic acid per nucleus was related to the chromosome number. Therefore, a large proportion of the nuclei in the liver of the adult rat should contain twice the amount of deoxynucleic acid found in the diploid nucleus. No direct evidence has been obtained for the rat; but Swift5 has shown in the adult mouse, by using the absorption of Feulgen-stained nuclei in histological sections as a measure of the amount of deoxynucleic acid per nucleus, that most of the nuclei in the liver contained twice the common amount of deoxynucleic acid which had been found in the small liver nuclei and in the nuclei of other tissues, including the kidney.

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HARRISON, M. Relation between Polyploidy and the Amounts of Deoxynucleic Acid per Nucleus in the Liver and Kidney of Adult Rats. Nature 168, 248–249 (1951). https://doi.org/10.1038/168248a0

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