PLoS ONE (Jan 2008)

Genetically-based olfactory signatures persist despite dietary variation.

  • Jae Kwak,
  • Alan Willse,
  • Koichi Matsumura,
  • Maryanne Curran Opiekun,
  • Weiguang Yi,
  • George Preti,
  • Kunio Yamazaki,
  • Gary K Beauchamp

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003591
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 3, no. 10
p. e3591

Abstract

Read online

Individual mice have a unique odor, or odortype, that facilitates individual recognition. Odortypes, like other phenotypes, can be influenced by genetic and environmental variation. The genetic influence derives in part from genes of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). A major environmental influence is diet, which could obscure the genetic contribution to odortype. Because odortype stability is a prerequisite for individual recognition under normal behavioral conditions, we investigated whether MHC-determined urinary odortypes of inbred mice can be identified in the face of large diet-induced variation. Mice trained to discriminate urines from panels of mice that differed both in diet and MHC type found the diet odor more salient in generalization trials. Nevertheless, when mice were trained to discriminate mice with only MHC differences (but on the same diet), they recognized the MHC difference when tested with urines from mice on a different diet. This indicates that MHC odor profiles remain despite large dietary variation. Chemical analyses of urinary volatile organic compounds (VOCs) extracted by solid phase microextraction (SPME) and analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) are consistent with this inference. Although diet influenced VOC variation more than MHC, with algorithmic training (supervised classification) MHC types could be accurately discriminated across different diets. Thus, although there are clear diet effects on urinary volatile profiles, they do not obscure MHC effects.