Comparative Study Of Primates

No one knows where the next breakthrough scientific discovery will come from. It could be synthetically derived or naturally produced, both are viable options and to not explore both of these options would be the equivalent of blindly using only half of your materials. Ancient societies experimented with numerous plant and animal parts to determine what effect they might have. Through trial and error they were able to discover valuable components for human ailments. While they were not always able to separate the “active” compounds, these represented the first crude drugs and this knowledge was passed down through the generations. Many of these traditional medicines have real, helpful effects and extracts of these crude drugs lead to the discovery

But we should not only use mammals as comparative models; in endocrinology the comparative study of non-mammals has helped in developmental research of the anterior pituitary using tunicates, a primitive chordate, as a model organism. Morphological, lineage, and immunohistochemical studies have shown the neural gland of tunicates is ectoderm derived (dual process of ciliated duct originating from non-neuronal ectoderm and invagination) and homologous to the vertebrae pituitary (Gorbman et al., 1999; Pestarino, 1985; Kouki et al., 2001). examined the evolution of pituitary function using a less rigorous comparative framework, e.g., examining structures homologous to the pituitary in organisms such as tunicates A comparative approach, using comparative anatomy and developmental genetics, to examine the evolution of pituitary function and probe functionality was crucial in highlighting Pitx genes and their evolutionary origin in the pituitary and their expression domain in embryos (Christiaen et al., 2002). Pit-1 transcription factor is a protein that is responsible for pituitary development and expression of adenohypophysis associated hormones (e.g. prolactin, growth hormone, and thyroid-stimulating hormones) and is also found in

The study of chicken bursa of Fabricius’, a hindgut lymphoid not found in humans, provided the discovery of B cells and there maturation. Glick et. al (1956) showed that removal of the bursa in newly hatched chicks severely impaired the ability of the adult birds to produce antibodies. The subsequent discovery of the thymus, which has a role in delayed hypersensitivity, and its similar evolutionary role in both humans and chickens convinced immunologist that there was functional disassociation between the thymus and bursa in chickens. This lead to the discovery of there being two separate parts of the immune system in humans: antibody-mediated immunity, with antibody producing cells called B cells after the bursa, and cell-mediated