Question: hi! I don't really understand the experiment that about the female's and the male's urine, can you please explain it in detail?

Darren Logan answered on 16 Mar 2012:

Yes. This is an example of an experiment to determine which type of smells that a mouse instinctively prefers.

So we put a male mouse into a “T” shaped arean and give him two choices: he can either turn left go down one arm of a “T” shaped area to smell female urine that we put at the end, or he can turn right and smell the male urine at the other end. We leave him for a few minutes to explore the different arms, and then at the end use a computer to track where he has been and count how often he sniffed each urine sample. Because the mouse is male, he will spend more time sniffing female urine than male urine.

We can use this knowledge to try different things next. For example, we could split the female urine into different parts and try and find out what it is in the urine that attracted the male mouse. Or we can change the genes in the male mouse, and see if any genes alter his preference for female urine.

The urine preference test is what we call a “bioassay” – that means it is a measurable behavioural difference that we can use to find out more about the biology behind it.