A light-dependent magnetoreception mechanism insensitive to light intensity and polarization.

ABSTRACT: 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. Geometr

SUBMITTER: Worster S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5636276 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature