Editor's Summary
30 August 2007
Love is in the air
The dominant theory about how the dramatic differences between male and female behaviour arise in mammals has been that gonadal hormones induce neural circuits early in the development of the brain, inducing or suppressing either male or female characteristics. But new work suggests that the preference to mate as a male or female is not pre-set during development. Pheromone perception has been found to change sexual behaviour in adult female mice. Key to the phenomenon is the vomeronasal organ, an auxiliary olfactory sense organ of unknown function found in the vomer bone, between the nose and mouth. Females with a defective vomeronasal organ display masculine sexual behaviour, suggesting that the effector circuits of both male and female behaviours exist in the brain of each sex, and are switched on or off by gender-specific sensory modulators, at least in females. It is thought that adult humans do not possess functional vomeronasal organs, but this discovery may nonetheless open new avenues for research into sex-specific human behaviour.
News and Views: Behavioural neurobiology: Females can also be from Mars
Is the preference to mate as a male or a female irreversibly set during development? Apparently not: a study in mice shows that pheromone perception determines how an adult female behaves sexually.
Nirao M. Shah & S. Marc Breedlove
doi:10.1038/nature05892
Article: A functional circuit underlying male sexual behaviour in the female mouse brain
Tali Kimchi, Jennings Xu & Catherine Dulac
doi:10.1038/nature06089
Abstract | Full Text | PDF (666K) | Supplementary information