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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Terry Maloney who wrote (289162)	6/18/2004 10:31:15 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

Here -g- Love rats turn faithful 18/06/2004 12:35 - (SA) Los Angeles - Researchers in the US have discovered the gene that they believe is responsible for making males monogamous. But possessive wives will not be able to use the discovery to tame their wandering husbands. So far the technique works only in the rat-like animal called voles. According to the report, published on Thursday in the journal Nature, scientists found that promiscuous males could be reprogrammed into monogamous partners by introducing a single gene into a specific part of their brains. Once they have been converted, the voles hang around the family nests and even huddle with their female partners after sex. "A mutation in a single gene can have a profound impact on complex social behaviour," said Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University who reported the results. The research centred on two types of voles - prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster), which pair up like humans in lifelong relationships, and meadow voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus), which mate with any available female and never form a lasting bond. Scientists discovered that the difference between them was that prairie voles have such receptors in a part of the brain known as the ventral pallidum, while meadow voles do not. By injecting a gene designed to activate the receptor, scientists found that the promiscuous voles became models of faithfulness, invariably choosing to stay with an original sex partner even when offered other females nearby were primed for mating. But the scientists warned against assuming the treatment would work so smoothly in humans, for whom culture and socialisation probably matter as much as biology. "The behaviour of animals is much simpler than the behaviour of humans," said Gene Robinson, head of neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who cautioned against extrapolating the results to humans. - Sapa-dpa