Journal article
No evidence for magnetic field effects on the behaviour of Drosophila
- Abstract:
- Migratory songbirds have the remarkable ability to extract directional information from the Earth’s magnetic field1,2. The exact mechanism of this light-dependent magnetic compass sense, however, is not fully understood. The most promising hypothesis focuses on the quantum spin dynamics of transient radical pairs formed in cryptochrome proteins in the retina3,4,5. Frustratingly, much of the supporting evidence for this theory is circumstantial, largely because of the extreme challenges posed by genetic modification of wild birds. Drosophila has therefore been recruited as a model organism, and several influential reports of cryptochrome-mediated magnetic field effects on fly behaviour have been widely interpreted as support for a radical pair-based mechanism in birds6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23. Here we report the results of an extensive study testing magnetic field effects on 97,658 flies moving in a two-arm maze and on 10,960 flies performing the spontaneous escape behaviour known as negative geotaxis. Under meticulously controlled conditions and with vast sample sizes, we have been unable to find evidence for magnetically sensitive behaviour in Drosophila. Moreover, after reassessment of the statistical approaches and sample sizes used in the studies that we tried to replicate, we suggest that many—if not all—of the original results were false positives. Our findings therefore cast considerable doubt on the existence of magnetic sensing in Drosophila and thus strongly suggest that night-migratory songbirds remain the organism of choice for elucidating the mechanism of light-dependent magnetoreception.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 6.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41586-023-06397-7
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature More from this journal
- Volume:
- 620
- Issue:
- 7974
- Pages:
- 595–599
- Publication date:
- 2023-08-09
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-07-03
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1476-4687
- ISSN:
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0028-0836
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Subjects:
- Pubs id:
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1507133
- Local pid:
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pubs:1507133
- Deposit date:
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2023-08-12
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Bassetto et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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