期刊
JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY INTERFACE
卷 14, 期 134, 页码 -出版社
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2017.0405
关键词
magnetoreception; radical pair mechanism; light polarization; photoselection; double-cone photoreceptor cells; opsin dimers
资金
- European Research Council (under the European Union's 7th Framework Programme, FP7/ERC grant) [340451]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Air Force Materiel Command, USAF) [FA9550-14-1-0095]
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [GRK 1885]
- Volkswagenstiftung (Lichtenberg Professur)
Billions of migratory birds navigate thousands of kilometres every year aided by a magnetic compass sense, the biophysical mechanism of which is unclear. One leading hypothesis is that absorption of light by specialized photoreceptors in the retina produces short-lived chemical intermediates known as radical pairs whose chemistry is sensitive to tiny magnetic interactions. A potentially serious but largely ignored obstacle to this theory is how directional information derived from the Earth's magnetic field can be separated from the much stronger variations in the intensity and polarization of the incident light. Here we propose a simple solution in which these extraneous effects are cancelled by taking the ratio of the signals from two neighbouring populations of magnetoreceptors. Geometric and biological arguments are used to derive a set of conditions that make this possible. We argue that one likely location of the magnetoreceptor molecules would be in association with ordered opsin dimers in the membrane discs of the outer segments of double-cone photoreceptor cells.
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