Public release date: 3-Sep-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Dr. Hilary Glover hilary.glover@biomedcentral.com 44-020-319-22370 BioMed Central

The way that the visual centers of men and women's brains works is different, finds new research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biology of Sex Differences. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.

In the brain there are high concentrations of male sex hormone (androgen) receptors throughout cerebral cortex, especially in the visual cortex which is responsible for processing images. Androgens are also responsible for controlling the development of neurons in the visual cortex during embryogenesis, meaning that males have 25% more of these neurons than females.

Researchers from Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges of the City University of New York compared the vision of men and women aged over 16 from both college and high school, including students and staff. All volunteers were required to have normal color vision and 20/20 sight (or 20/20 when corrected by glasses or contact lenses).

When the volunteers were required to describe colors shown to them across the visual spectrum it became obvious that the color vision of men was shifted, and that they required a slightly longer wavelength to experience the same hue as the women. The males also had a broader range in the center of the spectrum where they were less able to discriminate between colors.

An image of light and dark bars was used to measure contrast-sensitivity functions (CSF) of vision; the bars were either horizontal or vertical and volunteers had to choose which one they saw. In each image, when the light and dark bars were alternated the image appeared to flicker.

By varying how rapidly the bars alternated or how close together they were, the team found that at moderate rates of image change, observers lost sensitivity for close together bars, and gained sensitivity when the bars were farther apart. However when the image change was faster both sexes were less able to resolve the images over all bar widths. Overall the men were better able to resolve more rapidly changing images that were closer together than the women.

Prof Israel Abramov, who led this study commented, "As with other senses, such as hearing and the olfactory system, there are marked sex differences in vision between men and women. The elements of vision we measured are determined by inputs from specific sets of thalamic neurons into the primary visual cortex. We suggest that, since these neurons are guided by the cortex during embryogenesis, that testosterone plays a major role, somehow leading to different connectivity between males and females. The evolutionary driving force between these differences is less clear."

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The eyes have it: Men do see things differently to women

Albany Chehaw Parks Education and Animal Care Department and Georgia Southwestern State University (GSW) Biology Department are to begin a new partnership in conservation biology. For the first time during fall semester 2012, the University and the Zoo will collaborate in teaching a class in Zoo Animal Care and Maintenance.

It has always been a dream of mine to see Chehaw used to engage students as a learning institution, said Doug Porter, executive director for Chehaw. This new and exciting partnership will not only be beneficial to the Park and the University but to the greater community of Southwest Georgia.

The class will be a hands-on practice-oriented course in which more time will be spent working at the Zoo than sitting in the classroom. The goals of the course are to introduce students with a passion for animal husbandry and conservation to a career in zoo keeping. The course will cover the basics in zoo keeping, including, animal handling techniques, management, nutrition, breeding, behavior enrichment, exhibit design, zoo administration and public education of the major animal groups.

I am looking forward to getting this program off of the ground, shared Ian Brown, Ph.D., associate professor of biology at GSW. The chance to have our students working in this field as undergraduates will give them the experience that they will need when applying for future jobs in conservation.

The relationship between Chehaw Park and GSW has slowly gained momentum over the past eight years. As early as 2004, biology students began visiting the zoo to conduct behavioral observation laboratories on various animals such as the colobus monkey, flamingos, lemurs, meerkats and cheetahs. In recent years the zoo has used these student assignments as supporting material in grant applications. To date, three GSW biology majors have been hired as summer program instructors and another three have volunteered as zoo keeper assistants.

Zoo Animal Care and Maintenance students will spend their classroom time studying the theoretical aspects of the husbandry and welfare of non-domesticated animals in captivity and the logistics of zoological and conservation park operation. The overall focus in the classroom will be on the role that modern zoos must play in habitat and species conservation.

At Chehaw, the students will work alongside zoo professionals to learn the practical details of this important field. They also will be spending time with some of the Zoos leadership team, the Zoo director, the Zoo curator and Education coordinator to gain valuable insight into the inner workings of an AZA (Association of Zoos and Aquariums) -accredited Zoo.

This first class is being made possible through the willingness of university faculty and zoo personnel to take on additional workloads. In the future it is hoped that this initial class will grow into an entire zoo technology program with an emphasis in threatened species conservation.

The course instructors realize that modern Zoological and Conservation Parks and Aquariums utilize cutting edge technology to care for and breed many hundreds of animal species. Therefore most parks now require that their staff hold the minimum of a two-year and preferably a four-year degree in biology, animal husbandry or related field.

These new demands have opened up unique university-zoo collaboration opportunities to provide the requisite qualified zoo animal care personnel. Furthermore, in the near future a greater demand for zoos and aquariums is predicted, as their roles in animal conservation become increasingly more valuable.

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GSW, Chehaw collaborate in conservation biology

Bioinformatics historians take note: PLOS Computational Biology has published a comprehensive backgrounder on the field's biggest annual meeting the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.

Larry Hunter, who spearheaded the first ISMB in 1993, shares details on how the meeting grew out of a small group of artificial intelligence researchers with an interest in molecular biology. Other early organizers like Richard Lathrop, Russ Altman, Peter Karp, David Searls, and Alfonso Valencia weigh in on how the meeting and the field in general has changed during the past 20 years.

The first meeting was done "on a shoestring," Hunter says. "The program covers one 8.5 x 11 sheet, both sides, which I folded into three and made a nice, neat schedule, complete with the poster session. I kind of remember, now, putting that together on my early Mac. We did things pretty much on the cheap."

At the time, Lathrop says, "nobody had even broached the idea of sequencing the human genome. It was just too gargantuan and mammoth a task, and was considered almost heresy in its early days."

And despite the huge amount of progress during the last 20 years, there's still plenty of room for better bioinformatics tools. "We can sequence somebody's genome, and we've learned virtually nothing with any reasonable amount of certainty," Karp says. "I sure hope that in 10 or 20 years, we can do a lot more with a personal genome predict not just that they're five percent more likely to get some disease, but that they're 90 percent more likely to get one or more diseases. And the treatment that will help that individual."

For more reflections on ISMB's first 20 years, check out a recent interview with Hunter at our sister publication BioInform.

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Bioinformatics: The Early Years