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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2012 Apr 1.
Published in final edited form as: Reprod Toxicol. 2010 Oct 15;31(3):280–289. doi: 10.1016/j.reprotox.2010.10.002

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

The ontogeny of KISS neuronal development is sex specific in both the AVPV and the ARC and is reliably captured by quantifying the density of fibers immunoreactive for KISS in each region. (A) The density of KISS-ir fibers increases across peripubertal development in both sexes with females having twice as many as males by P30. (B) Ontogeny of AVPV Kiss1 mRNA is similar with expression levels three times that of males by P30. (C) Representative autoradiographs depicting Kiss1 mRNA expression in P30 males in females in the AVPV (upper panels) and ARC (lower panels). (D) In the ARC, the density of KISS-ir fibers rapidly increases in females between P10 and 20 while male levels remain relatively flat between P5 and P30. (E) This sex difference in fiber density is not recapitulated in mRNA levels which instead only show a trend for a sex difference on P20. (F) Immunopositive cell bodies in the ARC are difficult to discern from dense fiber labeling but the number of KISS neurons does not appear to be sex specific. (mean ±SEM; ‡p ≤ 0.1, *p ≤ 0.05, **p ≤ 0.01)