A STUDY OF THE METABOLISM OF RAT TESTIS IN VITRO1

Abstract

Introduction During the course of a study of the effect of various gonadotrophins on rat testis it seemed pertinent to correlate previously described changes in chemical morphology (Tepperman and Tepperman, 1947) with the metabolism of the gland in vitro. A survey of the literature revealed that Schuler (1944) and Meier and Schuler (1941) had made careful studies of the metabolism of surviving testis. The present study is an outgrowth of experiments that were done for the purpose of confirming an observation made by these authors. In 1944, Schuler reported that the of normal adult testis and that of testicular tissue obtained from weanling rats is about the same in the presence of added glucose. However, when glucose was omitted from the medium, the of surviving gland obtained from adult rats was very low, whereas that of the weanling rat’s gonad was slightly higher without added substrate than it was in the presence of 0.2% glucose.