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For: The opinion Posted 28 Jan 2023, 22:30 pm EST
A few weeks before Valentine’s Day, scientists found that the oxytocin, known as the love hormonemight not carry the weight that other researchers have assigned to it in the past on the formation of social bonds.
A new study from scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford Medicine turns decades-old dogma on its head and shows that the oxytocin receptora hormone considered essential for the formation of social bonds, may not play the essential role that scientists have assigned to it for the past 30 years.
In the study, published in Neuron, the team found that prairie voles (voles) reproduced without receptors for oxytocin and displayed the same monogamous mating, attachment, and parenting behaviors as normal voles. Also, females without oxytocin receptors gave birth and produced milkalthough in less quantity, than normal females.
The results indicate that the biology underlying mating bonding and nurturing is not dictated solely by oxytocin receptors, sometimes called “love hormone”.
“Even though oxytocin has been called ‘love potion number 9’, it seems that potions 1 through 8 might be enough,” says psychiatrist Devanand Manoli, MD, PhD, lead author of the paper and a member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. “This study tells us that oxytocin is probably just one part of a much more complex genetic program.”
Ankles and their history with the love hormone
Since the prairie voles They are one of the few mammalian species known to form lifelong monogamous relationshipsresearchers study them to better understand the biology of social bonding.
Studies conducted in the 1990s with drugs that prevented oxytocin from binding to its receptor found that the voles were unable to form pairswhich gave rise to the idea that the hormone is essential to form such links.
For this study, which lasted 15 years, the researchers applied new genetic technologies to confirm whether the binding of oxytocin to its receptor was indeed the factor underlying pair bonding. They used CRISPR (a family of DNA sequences) to generate prairie voles that lack functional oxytocin receptors. Next, they tested the mutant mice to see if they could form long-lasting mates with other mice.
To the surprise of the researchers, the mutant voles formed pairs just as easily as normal ones.
“The patterns were indistinguishable,” Manoli says. “The main behavioral traits thought to be dependent on oxytocin –sexual partners snuggle together and reject other potential partnersas well as nurturing by mothers and fathers – appear to be completely intact in the absence of their recipient.”
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