Aug 08: New break-through has been achieved in the understanding of sex-specific behaviour by the Howard university researchers. A new study on mice revealed that sex-specific behaviour is regulated by small sensory organ in nose and not by the brain.
The study has challenged the established assumption that different sex behaviour is due to different neural wires which are regulated by different hormones and thus control the sex specific behaviour.
A vomeronasal organ a cluster of receptors makes the mice smell pheromones which informs the brain about the gender of other mice evoking the fitting response. Pheromones inform about sexual readiness about the member. What researchers did is that they just had a simple mutation of TRPC2, and ion channel and disabled the VNO which now did not provide information about the other mice’s gender.
Researchers observed that female mice turned violent and aggressive and started showing male sexual behaviour. They started the courtship activity usually a male characteristic. They also did not show a maternal behaviour to the new born babies and left them uncared. They reflected the male behaviour without developing male hormones and maintained the testosterone levels, oestrogen levels and oestrus cycles.
Catherine Dulac Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology in Harvard University told that two conclusions can be drawn from this experiment that vomeronasal organ helps female specific neural circuit grow or in mature female mouse brain represses the male behaviour.
Dulac said that actually what research suggests is that there are same neural circuitry in male or females the only difference is vomeronasal organ in females which works almost as a switch which either motivates the female behaviour and pushes the male one into corners.
The research does not apply to humans as they lack that particular olfactory organ called vomeronasal organ.
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