Father Nose Best, Says Research on Daughters
A woman’s preference for one man’s scent over another’s is influenced by genes she inherited from her father, a new study suggests. One researcher said scent may play some role in choosing friends and even mates.
In the study, 49 unmarried women sniffed the contents of boxes, each of which had a different scent. They weren’t told that some scents came from T-shirts, each worn by one of six men. Women were asked which scent they would prefer if they had to smell it all the time.
The researchers also studied a sampling of MHC genes--which are key to the immune system--in the women and in the men who’d donated their scent. They separated out the MHC genes each woman inherited from dad--the paternal MHC genes--versus those from mom.
Analysis found that, in general, each woman’s favorite male scent, as compared to her least-favorite one, came from a man with more similarity to her own paternal MHC genes. There was no such relationship to genes inherited from the mother.
The work is reported in the February issue of the journal Nature Genetics by researchers at the University of Chicago.
Study co-author Martha McClintock noted that female mice seek MHC similarities when they pick other females to share in cooperative rearing of their offspring. The new study suggests people might be unconsciously influenced by odor in choosing their friends too, she said.
The new lab work didn’t focus on mate choice or how sexy the women found the odors to be. But McClintock said a previous study found people were less likely than one would expect by chance to marry a person with highly similar MHC genes. That finding and the new work suggests odor may play a role in choosing mates, McClintock said.
“Certainly that’s not going to be the only thing,” she said. But it could be a means of avoiding people with very high MHC similarity, or a very low one. A very high similarity could indicate a risk of inbreeding and miscarriage, while a low similarity might indicate the potential mate has unfavorable genes, she said.
Wayne Potts, a biologist at the University of Utah who studies MHC genes, cautioned against drawing conclusions about human behavior in ordinary life from the artificial setting of a lab experiment.
After all, he said, mice seek high MHC similarity in communal nest neighbors but low similarity in their sexual mates. So if they show preferences for certain smells in an experiment like McClintock’s, it’s hard to tell what it means for their behavior, he said.
