The medial preoptic area of the brain has been found over the years to be very closely involved with certain behaviors in mice, such as sexual proclivity, locomotion, aggression and the motivation to care for young. The chemistry involved in such behavioral activity has unfortunately though, remained rather a mystery. Now a team of researchers working at Rockefeller University have found, as they describe in their paper detailing their findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that a gene encoding estrogen receptor protein called ERa which is expressed in neurons in the preoptic part of the mouse brain, appears to impact the degree to which mice care for their young.
