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Sex determination

An avian sexual revolution

Nature volume 464, pages 171–172 (2010)Cite this article

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Hormones are not all-powerful in determining whether birds develop with male or female features. Chickens that are genetic sexual mosaics reveal that individual cells also have a say in the matter.

Male and female vertebrates have long been thought to owe their distinct sexual characteristics — their sexual phenotypes — to the action of hormones produced by the gonads. This basic paradigm maintains that sex determination occurs during embryonic development when genetic or environmental factors instruct the bipotential gonads to differentiate as ovaries or testes1,2. These organs, in turn, secrete hormones that secondarily instil a female or male phenotype in the reproductive tract and brain — and, in species with external sexual dimorphism, in tissues such as muscle and feathers. According to this view, sex-chromosome genotype is relevant only in the gonadal cells where primary sex determination occurs, because non-gonadal cells adopt a sexual phenotype according to the hormones they sense rather than their own complement of sex chromosomes1. On page 237 of this issue, however, Zhao et al.3 argue that, in birds, sex determination occurs in cells across the entire body, not just in the gonads.

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Figure 1: Funky chicken.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lindsey A. Barske and Blanche Capel are in the Department of Cell Biology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina 27710, USA. b.capel@cellbio.duke.edu,

    Lindsey A. Barske & Blanche Capel

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  1. Lindsey A. Barske
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  2. Blanche Capel
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Barske, L., Capel, B. An avian sexual revolution. Nature 464, 171–172 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/464171a

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