Tuesday, 07 February 2012
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best pheromones for men review
Anyone who spends time near a swamp can easily hear that frogs use their voices to chitchat, but it wasn’t until about two decades ago that researchers announced that these animals also speak to water-transported protein pheromones.
Now new information shows frogs banter with airborne chemicals too.
“It’s the initial proof that frogs use volatile pheromones” to speak, says Schultz, a chemical ecologist at the Technical University of Braunschweig, in Germany. In fact, it’s the very first proof that any amphibians communicate using chemicals in the air, he adds (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., DOI)
“So few pheromones have been chemically identified in vertebrates, making this really exciting news,” an amphibian biologist at Duquesne University. She highlights that biologists had done behavioral studies suggesting frogs used airborne pheromones, but none ended up identified until recently.
Within the new study, Schulz collaborated with TU Braunschweig zoologist Miguel Vences and Harvard University’s Katharina Wollenberg, who visited Madagascar to examine a local category of frogs called Mantellidae.
Male Mantellidae frogs have bulbous organs on their inner thighs called femoral glands, and it’s readily available sacs that the team isolated two molecules that waft with the air as pheromones, namely 8-methyl-2-nonanol and a macrolide called phoracantholide J.
The team discovered that Mantellidae frogs will hop toward a combination of these two molecules which different species have different ratios of these within their femoral glands. Precisely what these frogs say with all the molecules is up in mid-air, but Schulz has some speculations.
best pheromones for men review
“Frogs exist in high species diversity during these swampy areas-there are about 100 species,” Schulz says. Even though the different species croak uniquely, the frog density is so high that “it can be hard to discover a mate with the correct species.” Probably the odors assist with species recognition, he suggests.
The newest research also confirms the results of frog genome sequencing, Woodley says. Frog DNA has a number of genes for volatile chemical receptors, but nobody knew whether or not they were functional genes or just an artifact of evolution. “It turns out they may be functional,” she adds.
Schulz’s team isolated a number of other alcohols and macrolides from the frogs’ femoral glands, including a new natural product called gephyromantolide A. They also devised a fresh synthetic route for building the ringed molecules that uses a reaction called Corey-Nicolaou macrolactonization. The route, the shortest such path ever reported, provided enough sample to check which of the additional molecules are pheromones.
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