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Sensory biology

A whiff of genome

The relatedness of animals influences their behaviour, but how do they detect their kin? It seems that nasal sensory neurons differentiate between minute structural differences in urinary peptides that reflect genetic variation.

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Figure 1: Alternative sources of ligands for olfactory sensory neurons.

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Correspondence to Thomas Boehm.

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Boehm, T. A whiff of genome. Nature 496, 304–305 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/496304a

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