Sexual dimorphism articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    A study maps neuronal genomic targets of oestrogen receptor-α and shows how they coordinate brain sexual differentiation, concluding that the genome remains responsive to hormonal changes after structural dimorphisms have been established.

    • B. Gegenhuber
    • , M. V. Wu
    •  & J. Tollkuhn

  • Article |

    Quantitative connectivity matrices (or connectomes) for both adult sexes of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are presented that encompass all connections from sensory input to end-organ output across the entire animal.

    • Steven J. Cook
    • , Travis A. Jarrell
    •  & Scott W. Emmons

  • News & Views |

    As in humans, the actions and reactions of male and female fruitflies during courtship are quite distinct. The differences seem to lie in gender-specific neural interpretations of the same sensory signals. See Letter p.686

    • Richard Benton

  • Letter |

    Innate differences between male and female behaviours must be inscribed in their respective genomes, but how these encode distinct neuronal circuits remains largely unclear. Focusing on sex specific responses to the cVA pheromone in fruitflies, a chain of four successive neurons carrying olfactory signals down to motor centres has been identified, with all male to female anatomical differences lying downstream of a conserved sensory cell. The techniques developed should help others in the task of neuronal circuit mapping, which remains daunting even for the relatively simple fly brain.

    • Vanessa Ruta
    • , Sandeep Robert Datta
    •  & Richard Axel

  • Editorial |

    Biomedical research continues to use many more male subjects than females in both animal studies and human clinical trials. The unintended effect is to short-change women's health care.

  • Article |

    In mammals, embryos are considered to be sexually indifferent until the action of a sex-determining gene initiates gonadal differentiation. Here it is demonstrated that this situation is different for birds. Using rare, naturally occurring chimaeric chickens where one side of the animal appears male and the other female, it is shown that avian somatic cells possess an inherent sex identity and that, in birds, sexual differentiation is cell autonomous.

    • D. Zhao
    • , D. McBride
    •  & M. Clinton

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