Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77024, USA.
Science. 2012 May 25;336(6084):1054-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1216567. Epub 2012 Apr 26.
Many animals rely on Earth's magnetic field for spatial orientation and navigation. However, how the brain receives and interprets magnetic field information is unknown. Support for the existence of magnetic receptors in the vertebrate retina, beak, nose, and inner ear has been proposed, and immediate gene expression markers have identified several brain regions activated by magnetic stimulation, but the central neural mechanisms underlying magnetoreception remain unknown. Here we describe neuronal responses in the pigeon's brainstem that show how single cells encode magnetic field direction, intensity, and polarity; qualities that are necessary to derive an internal model representing directional heading and geosurface location. Our findings demonstrate that there is a neural substrate for a vertebrate magnetic sense.
许多动物依赖于地球磁场进行空间定位和导航。然而，大脑如何接收和解释磁场信息尚不清楚。有人提出，脊椎动物的视网膜、喙、鼻子和内耳中存在磁场受体，并且一些即时基因表达标记物已经鉴定出了对磁场刺激有反应的几个大脑区域，但磁受体的中枢神经机制仍不清楚。在这里，我们描述了鸽子脑干中的神经元反应，这些反应显示了单个细胞如何编码磁场方向、强度和极性；这些特性是推导代表方向和地表面位置的内部模型所必需的。我们的研究结果表明，存在一个用于脊椎动物磁感觉的神经基础。
