Mice can inherit learned sensitivity to smell

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JudyN
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Mice can inherit learned sensitivity to smell

Post by JudyN »

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... I.facebook

Teach a mouse to be afraid of a particular odour, and as a result of 'epigenetic' alteration, this fear is passed on to their young (conceived after the parent mouse was trained to fear the odour).

I don't know how far this could extend, and whether similar mechanisms would work in other species - if you teach a dog to sit on command its puppies won't automatically know the command - but it could still have wide implications. For example, an abused, traumatised dog may pass on a fearful nature to her/his puppies, and this fearfulness could even be specific, such as a fear of men wielding big sticks.

Or, a gundog trained to react to a specific cue, such as the sight of a shotgun or a pheasant, may pass on that response to their pups. This is fairly wild speculation, but I don't think it's impossible. The human brain, for example, has physical areas that store memories of, e.g., wild animals separate from farm animals - damage to an area can wipe out knowledge of one but not the other. And a zookeeper/farmer may even have physical changes in these areas of their brains, which could, possibly, affect the DNA...

Effects on dogs could well be masked by selection - does a deerhound respond to deer because his ancestors have been selected for this behaviour, or is there an element of learning being passed on from one generation to the next? You could test for this (though not in the UK :wink: ) by comparing pups of deerhounds who have been used to hunt against those who haven't, but only if you can assume that they were selected at random as pups, which you can't....

I'm extrapolating a long way from these initial findings, but as the standard theory for so long has been that learnt traits can't be passed on, it's interesting to speculate how far it could go.
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Nettle
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Re: Mice can inherit learned sensitivity to smell

Post by Nettle »

Interesting idea. Mice and rats show neophobia (fear of the unfamiliar) as a normal attribute, which is what makes them tricky to trap and poison. Would be even more interesting if the research was extended to animals that don't have such strong neophobic tendencies.
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