sexy mice

[JuggernautJon]

U can read more at richard dawkin's website

Male mice bred without serotonin lose their preference for females, a report in Nature says.

The researchers say it is the first time that a neurotransmitter has been shown to play a role in sexual preference in mammals.

Experts have warned about the dangers of drawing conclusions about human sexuality.

The research team first bred male mice whose brains were not receptive to serotonin.

A series of experiments demonstrated that these mice had lost the preference for females shown by unmodified males.

When presented with a choice of partners, they showed no overall preference for either males or females.

When just a male was introduced into the cage, the modified males were far more likely to mount the male and emit a "mating call" normally given off when encountering females than unmodified males were.

Similar results were achieved when a different set of mice were bred. These lacked the tryptonphan hydroxylase 2 gene, which is needed to produce serotonin.

However, a preference for females could be "restored" by injecting serotonin into the brain.

The report concludes: "Serotonergic signalling is crucial for male sexual preference in mice. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that a neurotransmitter in the brain has been demonstrated to be important in mammalian sexual preference."

Humans

Sexual behaviour in mice is thought to be driven by their sense of smell.

Professor Keith Kendrick, a neuroscientist at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, said: "In terms of having potential relevance to understanding human sexual preference/orientation, we are of course far less influenced by odour cues in this context than mice are.

[Davin]

Here's a good link to something about that:

Serotonin and Sexual Preference

[JuggernautJon]

Hey! Thanks Davin that's a good article. Lol have ya heard of the "gay gene?" Not sure which professor discovered it, unfortunately.

[Heretical Rants]

Hey! Thanks Davin that's a good article. Lol have ya heard of the "gay gene?" Not sure which professor discovered it, unfortunately.

No one has actually found such a thing and bringing the subject up only leads to meaningless debates. Even assuming that homosexuality is completely genetic, there's still a lot more involved than a single gene.

If there is a single gene that can cause a variation from the norm in sexual preference, then it is a statistical anomaly that no one has yet discovered or sequenced, and most gay people don't have it and are gay for other reasons.

[Tank]

It's all in the slimware I tell ya, all in the slimeware!!

[JuggernautJon]

Hey! Thanks Davin that's a good article. Lol have ya heard of the "gay gene?" Not sure which professor discovered it, unfortunately.

No one has actually found such a thing and bringing the subject up only leads to meaningless debates. Even assuming that homosexuality is completely genetic, there's still a lot more involved than a single gene.

If there is a single gene that can cause a variation from the norm in sexual preference, then it is a statistical anomaly that no one has yet discovered or sequenced, and most gay people don't have it and are gay for other reasons.

My sincere apologies for my absence of a reply. I've been away for a while. I believe it was genetic researcher Dean Hamer that supposedly made such a discovery in 1993. I'm not able to cite my sources because I'm going off of vague memory of what I've read somewhere but I am sure I can find it somewhere on the internet.