You think you might be pregnant? Here, have a frog.

[pne]

The things you find out while browing Wikipedia.

Did you know that one way of detecting pregnancies until the 1940s was through the use of a frog called Xenopus laevis, called Apothekerfrosch or "apothecaries' frog" in German?

Apparently what you'd do was bring a sample of your morning urine to the apothecary, who'd inject it into this frog. If the woman was pregnant, the frog would react to the hormone human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in the woman's urine and lay eggs within 48 hours; if it did so, this was a sign that the woman was indeed pregnant.

Comments

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

Fascinating! I may have to use that in a story. =)

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

I <3 Wikipedia. I've heared of it a long time ago, but now I'm actually using it on a regual basis :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

Yay!

It's such a great place for an infojunkie such as myself.

Do you have a user account there, as well? On the English and German ones, and maybe others?

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I don't have an account, but I browse it fairly often. I guess I could get one, but I don't think I'd ever edit articles etc.

Wikipedia account

[pne.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK.

Yeah, you'd really only need it if you want to edit many articles, or put some on a watchlist to see when they change, or stuff.

[n-true.livejournal.com]

The Wikipedia or the frog? ;D

(just being silly)

using frogs on a regular basis

[pne.livejournal.com]

"Am I pregnant? Where's my frog? What do you mean, I used up the last one yesterday and you forgot to buy new ones?"

Re: using frogs on a regular basis

[n-true.livejournal.com]

I do not want to know what animals were used instead of tampons... *cough* ;)

[denial-land.livejournal.com]

...your MOM.

[bride.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I hadn't heard of the frog, but I'd heard of the rabbit test =) In the 20's (I guess in North America), they used to inject the urine into a female rabbit and inspect the ovaries. It's not the death of the rabbit that indicates pregnancy, it's the change in the ovaries. It's just that they used to have to kill the rabbit to examine the ovaries.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

X. laevis is one of the model organisms used in biological research. I *heart* Wikipedia, but keep meaning to correct their Drosophila pages.

[pne.livejournal.com]

X. laevis is one of the model organisms used in biological research.

I've seen that term in the Wikipedia article on the frog. Perhaps you can explain to me what the term "model organism" means?

I know there's an article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_organism) on it, but perhaps you can tell me more. What are they used for, or how are model organisms selected?

I *heart* Wikipedia, but keep meaning to correct their Drosophila pages.

Please do. Everyone's an editor.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

Well, as Wikipedia says, they're organisms which are used as models to study basic biology which can then possibly be applied to other species. They're generally chosen due to ease of keep (e.g. small, short lifespan, many progeny) and manipulation (e.g. can be mutated with chemicals, few chromosomes). The yeast S. cerevisiae is a simple one-celled eukaryote which has interesting metabolism in that it can ferment sugar to produce ethanol. The nematode worm C. elegans *always* contains 959 cells so you can easily knock out a gene (e.g. by RNAi) and count the number of cells, is transparent so can be viewed under a microscope, and is used quite often in aging research. The complex body plan of the fruit fly D. melanogaster means it has been used for developmental biology research. And mice are used as a vague human model. Er, and that's all my brain can come up with at 4am...