The hormone oxytocin plays a key role in long-term relationships. But a study of prairie voles finds that the animals mate for life even without help from the 'love hormone.'
The team's experiment was designed to disrupt pair-bonding and other oxytocin-related behaviors in prairie voles.These include parenting, milk production, forming social attachments, and socially monogamous pair bonding.
This time the team removed fertilized eggs from female prairie voles, edited the genes, and then placed the embryos in females that were hormonally ready for pregnancy. "My initial response was, okay we have to do this three more times because we need to make sure this is 100% real," Manoli says. But repeated experiments confirmed the finding.It's still a mystery what drives pair-bonding in the absence of oxytocin. But it's clear, Manoli says, that"because of evolution, the parts of the brain and the circuitry that are responsible for pair-bond-formation don't rely on oxytocin.
One possible explanation for the result is that when prairie voles lack an oxytocin system almost from conception, they are able to draw on other systems to develop normally, Carter says.
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