ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Identification of a pheromone that increases anxiety in rats.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 69 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Bank vole alarm pheromone chemistry and effects in the field.Oecologia · 2021Article
- Smell and Stress Response in the Brain: Review of the Connection between Chemistry and Neuropharmacology.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Review
- Neurobiology of Infant Fear and Anxiety: Impacts of Delayed Amygdala Development and Attachment Figure Quality.Biological psychiatry · 2021Review
- Observational Fear Learning in Rats: Role of Trait Anxiety and Ultrasonic Vocalization.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- The acoustic startle reflex as a tool for assessment of odor environment effects on affective states in laboratory mice.Experimental animals · 2021Article
- Neuropeptide S Attenuates the Alarm Pheromone-Evoked Defensive and Risk Assessment Behaviors Through Activation of Cognate Receptor-Expressing Neurons in the Posterior Medial Amygdala.Frontiers in molecular neuroscience · 2021Article
- Processing of intraspecific chemical signals in the rodent brain.Cell and tissue research · 2021Review
- Indirect exposure to socially defeated conspecifics using recorded video activates the HPA axis and reduces reward sensitivity in mice.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The neural and computational systems of social learning.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Review
- Shared Pheromonal Communication of Specific Fear Between Adult Sprague Dawley Rats.Bio-protocol · 2020Article
- Rapid identification of species, sex and maturity by mass spectrometric analysis of animal faeces.BMC biology · 2019Article
- Social modulation of fear: Facilitation vs buffering.Genes, brain, and behavior · 2019Review
- Pheromone-Induced Odor Associative Fear Learning in Rats.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Suppressed acoustic startle response in traumatic brain injury masks post-traumatic stress disorder hyper-responsivity.Neuroreport · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Chemical communication plays an important role in the social lives of various mammalian species. Some of these chemicals are called pheromones. Rats release a specific odor into the air when stressed. This stress-related odor increases the anxiety levels of other rats; therefore, it is possible that the anxiety-causing molecules are present in the stress-related odorants. Here, we have tried to identify the responsible molecules by using the acoustic startle reflex as a bioassay system to detect anxiogenic activity. After successive fractionation of the stress-related odor, we detected 4-methylpentanal and hexanal in the final fraction that still possessed anxiogenic properties. Using synthetic molecules, we found that minute amounts of the binary mixture, but not either molecule separately, increased anxiety in rats. Furthermore, we determined that the mixture increased a specific type of anxiety and evoked anxiety-related behavioral responses in an experimental model that was different from the acoustic startle reflex. Analyses of neural mechanisms proposed that the neural circuit related to anxiety was only activated when the two molecules were simultaneously perceived by two olfactory systems. We concluded that the mixture is a pheromone that increases anxiety in rats. To our knowledge, this is the first study identifying a rat pheromone. Our results could aid further research on rat pheromones, which would enhance our understanding of chemical communication in mammals.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.