Sentences with phrase «meadow voles»

Social neurobiologist Lawrence Young of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues injected a virus carrying the V1aR gene into the brains of meadow voles to boost levels of V1aR.

In the new work, Miranda M. Lim of Emory University and her colleagues inserted a gene that encodes for the vasopressin receptor protein directly into the brains of male meadow voles.

Using the monogamous prairie vole (vs. the promiscuous meadow vole) as a model organism, Young and his research team identified the oxytocin and vasopressin receptors as key mediators of social bonding and attachment.

A transgenic meadow vole with added vasopressin receptors suddenly discovers the rewards of monogamy.

They found that meadow voles treated with gene therapy acted more like their prairie vole counterparts — they spent more time huddling near their original companion.

Normally, meadow voles show no allegiance to their old partner and hook up with the newcomer.

In contrast, captive male meadow voles, which often take multiple partners throughout their lives, lacked vasopressin receptors.

When scientists boosted the vasopressin receptor in the meadow vole, it became monogamous.

A few years ago, scientists looked into what made prairie voles so family - friendly and monogamous — one of the fewer than 5 percent of mammals that stick with its mate for life — when its cousin, the meadow vole, acts like a Don Juan, mating with as many females as possible and is clueless about raising its own children.

The difference is a protein called the vasopressin receptor, which is ample in the prairie vole but not in the meadow vole.

The research focused on two related species of vole: prairie voles, which are about as close as mammals get to being monogamous, and meadow voles, which express little interest in each other after copulation.

This pattern is true for two species of vole, the monogamous prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) and its promiscuous cousin, the meadow vole (M. pennsylvanicus).

The wayward ways of the meadow vole can be changed simply by increasing expression of V1aR in the brain, according to research published 17 June in Nature.

Hey, that sounds sort of like prairie voles and meadow voles.

Similarly, AAV - mediated V1aR gene transfer into the ventral forebrain of the promiscuous meadow vole (M. pennsylvanicus) enhances partner preference formation, a behavior that is not typically displayed by meadow voles (Lim et al., 2004).