Scientists make worms gay

By Hum
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Grand Master

Hum

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CHICAGO (Reuters) - Altering a gene in the brain of female worms changed their sexual orientation, U.S. researchers said on Thursday, making female worms attracted to other females.

The study reinforces the notion that sexual orientation is hard-wired in the brain, said Erik Jorgensen, scientific director of the Brain Institute at the University of Utah.

"They look like girls, but act and think like boys," Utah researcher Jamie White, who worked on the study published in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement.

Researchers in Jorgensen's lab switched on a gene in female worms that makes the body develop male structures, but they only activated the gene in the brain.

As a result, the female worms still had female bodies, but they behaved like males.

"It suggests sexual behavior is encoded in our genes" and not caused by extra nerve cells specific to males or females, Jorgensen said in a telephone interview.

Animals such as nematodes, fruit flies and mice share many of the same genes as humans and are often used as models to understand human genetics.

But Jorgensen said the study is not likely to resolve the burning question about the genesis of sexual orientation in humans. "A human's brain is much more complex than a worm's brain," he said.

Many scientists think a host of factors such as genetics, hormones and environment may play a role in determining sexual orientation in humans, but this has not been proven.

Jorgensen said the study is interesting because it suggests rather than being caused by extra, sex-specific nerve cells, attraction behaviors are part of the same brain circuit.

The finding was part of a study looking at areas in the worms' brains involved in sexual attraction.

Nematodes, or C. elegans, are tiny worms about one millimeter long that live in the dirt, chomping bacteria. They have no eyes and rely on smell for navigation and propagation.

There are few males, only one in 500, so most of these female nematodes are hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female sexual organs. This gives the female worms the ability to fertilize their own eggs and produce offspring in the absence of a male.

"For the most part they are females," Jorgensen said. "It's really hard to tell that they are hermaphrodites, but they do make these few sperm."

When they do mate with males, female worms produce 1,200 progeny, compared with just 200 when they produce their own sperm.

The researchers were trying to understand the underpinnings of sexual attraction in the male nematodes.

They reasoned it could arise from four extra smell-related nerve cells found only in male worm brains, from four core nerves found in both males and females or from a mix of both.

When they systematically neutralized the male-only neurons, mature male worms still responded to the females.

The findings imply nerve cells common to both male and female worms are central to sexual attraction and sexual orientation.

"They have genes for both male behavior and female behavior in them," Jorgensen said. "It suggests the brain determines behavior."

The study expands on prior studies suggesting a genetic component to sexual orientation.

"This is one more observation. We've seen this in flies and in mice," he said. "The difference is we know what cells are involved."

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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Grand Master

WelshBluebird

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I can't see what this proves. Apart from that its possible to turn females into males (which we already knew was possible).

I just don't see the link with homosexuality in this study. All they've done is basically made the female worm think its male. If I somehow made a female human think she's a man, and thus she its attracted to other woman - that doesn't mean she's a lesbian. That means she thinks she's male.

As for the comment by Lemonzest - I vote that we all ignore it.

Grand Master

redfish

Posted
Posted (edited)

it was known for a long time that certain lower life forms had pheremones. the most interesting part of the study is "The females that are now attracted to other females, they get there and they don’t know what to do". So it has nothing to do with actual sex, but attraction. Got it.

The problem is when you have politics behind this, people won't report this as the most interesting part of the story. We also know humans don't operate on pheremones.

Now everyone start talking about homosexuality, when this says absolutely nothing about it (except that in worms having sex isn't caused by pheremones). If it proved homosexuality were really genetic we would expect the female worms to start having sex with each other, not some additional BS excuse.

Edited by brianshapiro
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aubaine

Posted
Posted

This article confused me. It says that it made "females act like males" but it doesn't say what behavior they classified as "male" except for being attracted to other females. Were there other inherently "male" behavior traits that they exhibited? If so, what were they?

Something definitely sounds fishy here, but from what I know about scientific reporting, it could just as well be with the reporter as the study itself.

As for the homophobes and bigots that have posted, if you're just going to flame and add nothing to the discussion, why don't you go somewhere else?

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