A team from the CSIC has found the mechanism by which female seabass turn into males when the temperature increases. The effect would be related to the silencing of an enzyme responsible for the formation of female organs.
The researchers subjected two groups of seabass larvae to different temperatures during the first weeks of life, verifying that in some cases the females turned into males. The results showed that the thermal increase inhibited the formation of aromatase , an enzyme that converts androgens into estrogens , which are essential in the development of fish ovaries. In this way, if the animal is subjected to the increase in temperature before the formation of the reproductive organs, it has a greater probability of growing as a male individual despite the fact that its genetic information indicates otherwise.
This phenomenon by which the environmental temperature influences the determination of sex is common in many species of fish and reptiles. “This influence is accentuated more in some cases, in which the fact that it is more or less hot is imposed on the genetic information written in the DNA”, explains the CSIC researcher Francesc Piferrer, from the Institute of Marine Sciences and participant in the study.
The results of this work explain at the molecular level how an increase of a few degrees leads to the masculinization of some animals, a phenomenon undoubtedly of importance given that with global warming the temperature of the water in rivers and oceans will increase.
