What do monarch butterflies, salmon, lobsters, bats, mole rats, and marine nudibranch mollusks have in common? As I'm sure you already knew, all of these species (among others) can sense and use magnetic fields.
Although the ability of biological entities to register magnetic fields is fairly well accepted, the means by which they do so hasn't been definitively identified. A lot of attention has focused on cases where small clusters of iron are formed within cells. But researchers in China figured that a protein might exist that could act as a magnetic sensor. So they screened the Drosphila genome for one that fit the bill—and found it.
A couple of different models have been postulated to explain the biological basis of magnetosensing. Cryptochromes (Cry) are light-sensing proteins used by birds to orient and navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. Although these can sense the inclination of the geomagnetic field, they cannot detect polarity and thus cannot function as a compass.
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