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

[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...