Dutch researcher Tessa Hartog knows how you can make a female canary sing using testosterone and the protein BDNF. Normally, female canaries don't sing, but with a few tweaks, the females' brain structure can be altered in a way that lets them burst into song. Their singing can even be sexy. The influence of hormones on the brain, and on learning and memory processes, is complex and difficult to measure, but canary song is a good model for analysing these types of process. Hartog analysed which substances played a part in the singing behaviour of female canaries and how these substances altered the anatomy of the brain. Previous research had already shown that testosterone influenced singing behaviour. It gave rise to new neurones (nerve cells) in the area of the brain that controls singing. However, the extent to which other proteins, such as BDNF, also played a part remained unclear. Hartog established that BDNF could get the females to sing, even if the female birds had not been treated with testosterone. Moreover, combining BDNF and testosterone allowed the females to master the art of ‘sexy' song structures, normally reserved for virile male birds.
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