The Manoilov and other ‘Chemical Sex Reactions’

Abstract

SINCE 1924, Joyet-Lavergne,¹ working with plants and Protozoa, has been developing the view that in general female sexual cells are more reducing than male as judged by their effects on the colours of dyes; recently² he considers that they contain more reduced glutathione because they give the colour reactions of this substance more strongly. In 1922, Manoilov³ developed a ‘test for sex ’in plants by an elaborate treatment of dyes of the rosaniline series as a result of which the female side was made to display the deeper colour, that is, the reverse of the Joyet-Lavergne effect; Satina and Demerec⁴ have confirmed and developed this test, applying it to animal tissues, and amongst others to the cladoceran Crustacea Moina and Daphnia.⁵ More recently, Falk and Lorberblatt,⁶ working again with animals (mammalian ovary and testis), have demonstrated that the test depends on an oxidation phenomenon, the more complicated Manoilov technique being replaceable by the oxidation of colourless p-leucaniline in the presence of sufficient ferric chloride by which the female side again produces the deeper colour of p-rosaniline and is therefore apparently more oxidising than the male; Falk and Lorberblatt also report an “interesting parallelism’ in that the extract of testis which they used was found to have considerable reducing power as shown by Tunnicliffe's method of estimating glutathione⁷ whilst the ovarian extract had none, and Sir Frederick Hopkins tells me that this disparity has been long familiar to him.