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Sniffing out social signals

Chemical communication and the vomeronasal organ

  • Review article
  • Published:
e-Neuroforum

Abstract

In most mammals, conspecific chemical communication strategies control complex social and sexual behavior. Just a few years ago, our concept of how the olfactory system is organized to ensure faithful transmission of social information built on the rather simplistic assumption that two fundamentally different classes of stimuli – ‘general’ odors versus ‘pheromones’ – are exclusively detected by either of two sensory structures: the main olfactory epithelium or the vomeronasal organ. A number of exciting recent findings, however, revealed a much more complex and functionally diverse organizational structure of the sense of smell. At least four anatomically segregated olfactory subsystems, some remarkably heterogeneous in their cellular composition, detect distinct, but partially overlapping populations of sensory stimuli. Discerning how subsystem-specific receptor architectures and signaling pathways orchestrate the coding logic of social chemosignals, will ultimately shed new light on the neurophysiological basis of social behavior.

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Acknowledgement

Work in the author’s laboratory is generously supported by the Emmy Noether-Program of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SP724/2–1), the Mercator Foundation (Junges Kolleg), and within the funding initiative Lichtenberg Professorships of the Volkswagen Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Biology II/Dept. Chemosensation,Sammelbau Biologie, 42D/R253, RWTH Aachen, Worringer Weg 1, 52074, Aachen, Deutschland

    M. Spehr

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Spehr, M. Sniffing out social signals. e-Neuroforum 1, 9–16 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13295-010-0002-1

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