HOW do you turn a sexually passive female mouse into a masculine sex machine? Remove her vomeronasal organ.
Sitting in the nasal cavity, the VNO detects pheromones, which carry social and sexual signals. A team led by Catherine Dulac at Harvard University either surgically removed the organ in adult female mice, or studied females in which both copies of the gene for a key signalling protein in the organ had been knocked out. In both groups, the females indiscriminately pursued and mounted mice of either sex. They also adopted the pelvic thrusts and ultrasonic mating calls typical of sexually mature…
