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All that’s new and approved from the Faculty of 1000 this week.

Sex and the single cell

A question that had never really occurred to me was answered in PLoS Biology the other day: what sex are cells? Now, it’s true that every somatic cell of mine has both X and Y chromosomes, I never thought of, say, my hair follicles as being particularly male. Other parts, well, naturally.

In Drosophila, the transcription factor responsible for driving sexual differentiation is called doublesex (those crazy fly geneticists, eh?). It is expressed in cells that one might expect to be male or female