Sexual behaviour articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    A study maps neuronal genomic targets of oestrogen receptor-α and shows how they coordinate brain sexual differentiation, concluding that the genome remains responsive to hormonal changes after structural dimorphisms have been established.

    • B. Gegenhuber
    • , M. V. Wu
    •  & J. Tollkuhn

  • Article |

    Ultrasonic vocalizations of male mice distinguish aggressive, male-directed mounting from reproductive, female-directed mounting behaviours, which are represented by distinct ESR1-expressing populations of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus and medial preoptic area, respectively.

    • Tomomi Karigo
    • , Ann Kennedy
    •  & David J. Anderson

  • Article |

    In Drosophila melanogaster, female mating decisions are governed by female-specific descending neurons that integrate input from auditory neurons that respond to features of the song of a conspecific male and central neurons that encode the mating status of the female.

    • Kaiyu Wang
    • , Fei Wang
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • Article |

    Neuron-tracing and labelling experiments in Drosophila females reveal the neural circuitry that coordinates mating and egg laying, and the role of sex peptide from male seminal fluid in triggering these neurons.

    • Fei Wang
    • , Kaiyu Wang
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • Article |

    Quantitative connectivity matrices (or connectomes) for both adult sexes of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are presented that encompass all connections from sensory input to end-organ output across the entire animal.

    • Steven J. Cook
    • , Travis A. Jarrell
    •  & Scott W. Emmons

  • News & Views |

    Male fruitflies quickly learn that courting already-mated females is useless. It turns out that a small subset of neurons in the male brain signals this negative experience and controls pheromone sensitivity. See Letter p.145

    • Aki Ejima

  • Letter |

    Young male fruitflies learn to avoid futile courtship of non-virgin females because the latter are scented with the male pheromone cis-vaccenyl acetate; this behaviour results from an increase in the males’ innate sensitivity for the pheromone and is controlled by a small set of dopaminergic neurons.

    • Krystyna Keleman
    • , Eleftheria Vrontou
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • News & Views |

    Some fruit odours sexually arouse male fruitflies. The response is mediated by olfactory neurons that are sensitive to food smells and plug into the brain's neural circuit for sexual behaviour. See Letter p.236

    • Benjamin Prud'homme
    •  & Nicolas Gompel

  • Letter |

    Although it has been known for some time that rodent mating depends on many social and chemical cues, very little is known about the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying such behaviour. Here it is shown that serotonergic neuron signalling seems to stabilize sexual preference, with the loss of the neurotransmitter serotonin causing indiscriminate mating behaviour in male mice.

    • Yan Liu
    • , Yun’ai Jiang
    •  & Yi Rao

  • News & Views |

    In mice, brain neurons that respond during either mating or aggression exhibit spatial overlap, and some even respond during both. This may help to explain the relationship between sex and violence in human behaviour. See Article p.221

    • Clifford B. Saper

  • News & Views |

    Studies of animal populations often use tags to track the fate of individuals and assume that there is no adverse impact. Work on penguins shows that seemingly innocuous flipper bands affect survival and breeding success. See Letter p.203

    • Rory P. Wilson

  • News & Views |

    As in humans, the actions and reactions of male and female fruitflies during courtship are quite distinct. The differences seem to lie in gender-specific neural interpretations of the same sensory signals. See Letter p.686

    • Richard Benton

  • Letter |

    Innate differences between male and female behaviours must be inscribed in their respective genomes, but how these encode distinct neuronal circuits remains largely unclear. Focusing on sex specific responses to the cVA pheromone in fruitflies, a chain of four successive neurons carrying olfactory signals down to motor centres has been identified, with all male to female anatomical differences lying downstream of a conserved sensory cell. The techniques developed should help others in the task of neuronal circuit mapping, which remains daunting even for the relatively simple fly brain.

    • Vanessa Ruta
    • , Sandeep Robert Datta
    •  & Richard Axel

  • News Feature |

    Can epigenetics underlie the enduring effects of a mother's love? Lizzie Buchen investigates the criticisms of a landmark study and the controversial field to which it gave birth.

    • Lizzie Buchen

  • Letter |

    Although pheromones and their detection by the vomeronasal organ are known to govern social behaviour in mice, specific chemical signals have rarely been linked to selective behavioural responses. Here the authors show that the ESP1 peptide secreted in male tears makes females sexually receptive, and identify its specific vomeronasal receptor and the sex-specific neuronal circuits activated during the behavioural response.

    • Sachiko Haga
    • , Tatsuya Hattori
    •  & Kazushige Touhara

  • Letter |

    The European corn borer consists of two sex pheromone races, leading to strong reproductive isolation which could represent a first step in speciation. Female sex pheromone production and male behavioural response are under the control of different genes, but the identity of these genes is unknown. These authors show that allelic variation in a gene essential for pheromone biosynthesis accounts for the phenotypic variation in female pheromone production, leading to race-specific signals.

    • Jean-Marc Lassance
    • , Astrid T. Groot
    •  & Christer Löfstedt

  • Editorial |

    Biomedical research continues to use many more male subjects than females in both animal studies and human clinical trials. The unintended effect is to short-change women's health care.

  • Letter |

    Before mating, a yeast cell must detect a partner cell that is close enough and expresses sufficiently large amounts of a sex pheromone. The mating decision is an all-or-none, switch-like response to pheromone concentration. It is now shown that this decision involves the competition of one kinase and one phosphatase enzyme for multiple phosphorylation sites on a 'scaffold' protein. The results should prompt a re-evaluation of the role of related signalling molecules that have been implicated in cancer.

    • Mohan K. Malleshaiah
    • , Vahid Shahrezaei
    •  & Stephen W. Michnick

  • Letter |

    Male pregnancy is restricted to seahorses, pipefishes and their relatives, in which young are nurtured in the male's brood pouch. It is now clear that the brood pouch has a further function. Studies of Gulf pipefish show that males can selectively abort embryos from females perceived as less attractive, saving resources for more hopeful prospects later. This is the only known example of post-copulatory sexual conflict in a sex-reversed species.

    • Kimberly A. Paczolt
    •  & Adam G. Jones

  • Article |

    In mammals, embryos are considered to be sexually indifferent until the action of a sex-determining gene initiates gonadal differentiation. Here it is demonstrated that this situation is different for birds. Using rare, naturally occurring chimaeric chickens where one side of the animal appears male and the other female, it is shown that avian somatic cells possess an inherent sex identity and that, in birds, sexual differentiation is cell autonomous.

    • D. Zhao
    • , D. McBride
    •  & M. Clinton

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