While the term is new, many of the identities lumped under the genderqueer umbrella are not. “Androgyne” was originally synonymous with hermaphrodite (now considered a derogatory term for intersex individuals). As defined by Oxford Online, androgyne arose “mid 16th century (as a noun): via Latin from Greek androgunos, from anēr, andr‘man’ + gunē ‘woman’”. “The Greeks possessed a really astonish...

Males of the androdioecious species Caenorhabditis elegans are more likely to attempt to mate with and successfully inseminate C. elegans hermaphrodites that do not concurrently harbor sperm. Although a small number of genes have been implicated in this effect, the mechanism by which it arises remains unknown. In the context of the battle of the sexes, it is also unknown whether this effect is ...

Gene-specific and chromosome-wide mechanisms of transcriptional regulation control development in multicellular organisms. SDC-2, the determinant of hermaphrodite fate in Caenorhabditis elegans, is a paradigm for both modes of regulation. SDC-2 represses transcription of X chromosomes to achieve dosage compensation, and it also represses the male sex-determination gene her-1 to elicit hermaphro...

eIF4E plays a conserved role in initiating protein synthesis, but with multiple eIF4E isoforms present in many organisms, these proteins also adopt specialized functions. Previous RNAi studies showed that ife-3, encoding the sole canonical eIF4E isoform of Caenorhabditis elegans, is essential for viability. Using ife-3 gene mutations, we show here that it is maternal ife-3 function that is esse...

Animals generated by systematic mutagenesis and routine breeding are often infertile because they lack germ cells, and maintenance of such lines of animals has been impossible. We found a hermaphrodite infertile mouse in our colony, a genetic male with an abnormal Y chromosome lacking developing germ cells. We tried to clone this mouse by conventional nuclear transfer but without success. ES ce...

The outcome of plant-animal interactions in dioecious plant species frequently depends on the gender of the plant individuals. It has even been proposed that these interactions could mediate the evolution of plant reproductive systems from hermaphroditism to dioecy. Gynodioecy is the most frequent intermediate stage in this evolutionary process, however, little is known about the relevance of g...

relative to a hereditary torsion theory $tau$ we introduce a dimension for a module $m$, called {em $tau$-rank of} $m$, which coincides with the reduced rank of $m$ whenever $tau$ is the goldie torsion theory. it is shown that the $tau$-rank of $m$ is measured by the length of certain decompositions of the $tau$-injective hull of $m$. moreover, some relations between the $tau$-rank of $m$ and c...