Potential for sexual conflict assessed via testosterone-mediated transcriptional changes in liver and muscle of a songbird.

ABSTRACT: Males and females can be highly dimorphic in metabolism and physiology despite sharing nearly identical genomes, and both sexes respond phenotypically to elevated testosterone, a steroid hormone that alters gene expression. Only recently has it become possible to learn how a hormone such as testosterone affects global gene expression in non-model systems, and whether it affects the same genes in males and females. To investigate the transcriptional mechanisms by which testosterone exerts its metabolic and physiological effects on the periphery, we compared gene expression by sex and in response to experimentally elevated testosterone in a well-studied bird species, the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis). We identified 291 genes in the liver and 658 in the pectoralis muscle that were differen

SUBMITTER: Peterson MP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3922831 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature