Posted on 01/03/2006 12:18:02 PM PST by doc30
Mixed chicks sing song of a different species Bird brains hardwired to learn own songs
By ANNE MCILROY
McGill University researcher Evan Balaban performs brain transplants on chickens to make them sing like quails. He takes bits of brain from quail embryos and attaches them to the brains of embryonic chickens still snug in their eggs.
When they hatch, the chickens look normal, except for the dark, quail-coloured feathers sprouting out of their heads. But they do not sound normal. Instead of crowing the classic cock-a-doodle-doo, they sing the two introductory notes and the long trill of a quail song.
"They actually sing like quails," he said.
Dr. Balaban, who recently moved to Montreal's McGill from the United States, is not trying to create feathered Frankenstein monsters. His chimeras, as the quail-chicken combos are known, are a tool for learning how brains are programmed to play a role in particular behaviours.
What makes roosters crow and quails sing?
In the past, researchers believed that birds learned their songs from their parents and other birds in their communities.
But studies have shown that bird brains appear to be hardwired to learn the songs of their own kind. Baby birds hatched in a laboratory and exposed to recordings of the songs of more than one species learn and retain their own songs at a much higher rate.
The same process may be at work with human infants, who even as newborns are attracted to the sounds of speech. No one understands how this works.
Dr. Balaban and his colleagues decided that brain transplants were a good way to find out. He does not believe the surgery, as it is now performed, would work in humans. In the future, however, it may help surgeons use donor cells from other species; for example, grafting brain cells taken from pig embryos to the brains of people with neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease.
Dr. Balaban spent 12 years perfecting the chicken-to-quail brain transplant. He is establishing his new lab, and soon will be teaching graduate students in Montreal how to perform the surgery.
Using a wee pair of scissors, he cuts tiny windows in the eggshells. Then he switches to micro-scalpels made out of stainless-steel wire he sharpens under a microscope. He removes chicken brain cells and replaces them with quail brain cells.
By the process of elimination, he and his colleagues in the United States identified a small group of cells that made quails sing like quails. The scientists have also isolated the cells responsible for the bobbing head movements that quails make when they sing, and even for a particular, frantic sound quail parents make when warning their offspring of danger.
Chicken brains are bigger, so it is easier to perform the brain transplants on them. Chickens normally have white or yellow feathers. They sprout black and brown quail-coloured feathers because the transplant includes cells that determine the skin and feather pigmentation.
After the surgery, the chickens hatch and grow for two weeks before their bodies reject the quail cells.
That gives Dr. Balaban little time to figure out what is going on. He has not detected many physical differences between the quail brain cells and the chicken brain cells. The two birds, after all, are closely related.
But he is hoping that high-resolution brain-imaging equipment, designed specially for tiny animals, will help him understand what happens after the transplant, but before the birds hatch. He uses the scans to compare normal chicken brains with those that have had the transplant.
There are indications that the quail song is not embedded in the quail brain cell like a computer chip; change the chip and you change the song. It is more complicated than that. The quail cells seem to send out signals, chemical cues that tell the embryonic chicken brain to build a particular circuit of cells responsible for the quail song.
He is hoping to learn how the quail song circuit is connected to the rest of the brain, and how long before hatching can the brain tell the difference between songs.
The scissors come in three sizes; wee, not so wee and FRIGGIN HUGE!!!!
That's what I thought when I read the title! LOL! I thought it was an article by The Dixie Chicks.
I thought roosters did the cock-a-doodle-doo thang, not chickens........
Stupid article about stupid chickens who don't even know they're not roosters??
FMCDH(BITS)
All I can say is ,"Thank God Dan isn't Vice President now!"
First, birds don't have vocal cords. Mammals have vocal cords. Second, it seems the 'scientist' is pulling some embryonic cells from the brain region of quail embryos and injecting them into the developing brains of chicken embryos. THe quail feathers come from skin tissue embryo cells contaminating the sampling of the brain embryos. And I never thought I'd ever write a sentence describing the vivisection and fusion of embryo brains!
First, I know birds don't have vocal cords, but they do have an apparatus for making sounds and that apparatus is unique to each species, therefore chickens will not sound like quail unless this part of them changes also. The article did not state he used embryos, not that I recall anyway, and certainly nothing was said about stem cells. If they are already brain cells then the odds of them being unformed stem cells seems remote. If stem cells were not used then it is highly likely no quail DNA was incorporated into the chicken, if it wasn't then there would be no growing of quail feathers and no sounding like a quail, no matter how much the chicken wanted to.
Don't be so quick to be an asshole, it is bad for your health. I stand by my statement, this could very well be false research and nothing but BS, witness the Korean scientist and his human stem cell "research" that was all faked. If you have any more smart assed, facetious or patronizing remarks please feel free to express them.
Oh, yes, one more thing, the vocal apparatus of which I was speaking is called the syrinx and though it differs from the human Larnyx some scientists still refer to it as the "vocal chords" when speaking to laymen. Have a great day.
LOL!
In your first post, you sounded like an ignoramous. So I guess you decided to google a few things to sound impressive. But then again, you have a solid anti-science streak so I doubt if you even have the capacity to understand the article.
Science is not perfect, a lot of scientists fake research, many of them are liberals and have an agenda and like all liberals they tend to see the ends justifying the means. That does not mean that I am against science, I think it is great, but research into embryonic stem cells, human stem cells, has made very little, if any, progress and I doubt this mans research. He offers no proof.
Also I notice you didn't address the fact that the article didn't mention stem cells and decided to attack my intelligence because you lack an intelligent answer, you sound very much like a liberal to me, probably a liberal scientists to boot.
Fake any research lately? Have a good day(if that's possible for a sour jerk like you)
Yes, but how do they taste?
From the article:
They sprout black and brown quail-coloured feathers because the transplant includes cells that determine the skin and feather pigmentation.
After the surgery, the chickens hatch and grow for two weeks before their bodies reject the quail cells.
Sounds phony to me, could be he is doing what that Korean guy did, making phony evidence to get his name in the books.
I await replication in other labs.
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