The effect of insulin on development of duck embryos

✍ Scribed by Landauer, Walter

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1951
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 574 KB
• Volume: 117
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-104X
• DOI: 10.1002/jez.1401170309

✦ Synopsis

We have shown earlier that insulin has well-defined teratogenic effects on developing chicken embryos. These effects are chiefly, in fact probably exclusively, skeletal; but, in addition, general body dwarfing may exist. Depending on embryonic age at the time of treatment, different skeletal abnormalities are produced, such as rumplessness, micromelia, beak deformities, and so on. Incidence and degree of each of these malformations vary with the amount of injected insulin, but also with other factors, including the genotype.

Are these reactions specific for chicken embryos or do they, in a similar fashion, occur in other forms? The present report will describe the results of experiments with duck eggs. Our choice of material was limited by the need for a quantity of eggs sufficient for statistical evaluation of the results. Duck eggs seemed to be particularly desirable for additional reasons. The order of Anseriformes to which ducks belong has no close evolutionary relationship to the order of Galliformes. The germinal disc of duck eggs is at the time of laying in a somewhat earlier stage(8-10 hours) than that of chicken eggs and the period of incubation is 28 days for ducks of the genus Anas as compared with 21 days for chickens. These developmental differences might be responsible for divergencies of reaction to insulin.

We used eggs of Pekin ducks for our experiments. The eggs were divided into 14 groups. One of these served as untreated control. I n the remaining 13 groups each egg 559