For this reason, lower levels of Vitamin D could feasibly lead to differences in the developing brain's wiring, which might explain the higher rates of mental illnesses like schizophrenia or depression among people born in the winter.
However, knowledge concerning the genetic basis of sexually dimorphic traits is limited in any organism, including mosquitoes, especially with respect to differences in the developing nervous system.
Improvements in neuroimaging technologies, and greater access to their use, have generated a plethora of data regarding male/female differences in the developing brain.
Their progeny were collected as wandering third instar larvae and sexed using morphological differences in the developing germline and genital imaginal disc.
A wide variety of ion transporters are upregulated in male pupal heads, which suggests that sexually dimorphic differences in the developing mosquito brain may result from differential ion channel expression.
There are also subtle but complex sex differences in the developing hippocampus that are associated with parameters responsive to oestradiol, including calcium entry in response to depolarizing GABA [ 21- 24] and cell genesis [ 25].
We have identified genes that later at E8.5 are restricted to the midgut and hindgut (Ppp1r14a; Figure 4I), as have others previously (Sox17, [ 35]; Tmprss2, [ 46]), highlighting anterior-posterior differences in the developing gut tube.
If the original egg cell contained defective mitochondrial DNA, some of these new cells end up containing more defective copies than others, leading to cell-to-cell differences in the developing embryo.
