Snooty Exchanges Are Key to Mouse Society

摘要

How would you go about sizing up an attractive stranger―by maximizing eye contact, looking for a smile, or maybe sneaking a peek at the shoes? As visual creatures, we humans rely heavily on our eyes in social situations. But as anyone who's ever walked a dog in a crowded park knows, other animals have different means of checking each other out. For animals ranging from elephants to mice, olfactory cues called pheromones convey a wealth of information about the identity and mood of other individuals. A whiff of the right pheromones can spark a fit of rage or a bout of mating. Now, on page 1196, neuroscientists report a major step toward understanding how pheromone cues are processed in the brain. By recording the electric chatter of neurons in the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB) of mice as they sniff another mouse, the researchers have discovered neurons that vary their activity in response to the sex and genetic strain of the sniffee. This suggests that the AOB extracts important social information from pheromonal cues.