SEMINAR: CMCA Seminar Series 2014: "The search for a magnetic sense in the birds and the bees ..."

Many animals possess a magnetic sense, which they use as a type of biological GPS to navigate short or long distances. Despite a wealth of behavioural evidence for magnetoreception, the cellular mechanisms that must underlie such a sense await discovery. Dr Jeremy Shaw focuses on the use of cutting-edge optical, electron and X-ray microscopy techniques to explore the magnetoreception question and has contributed to new discoveries in this field with publications in the journals Nature and Current Biology. Dr Shaw’s research is now centred on the use of the honeybee Apis mellifera as a model system to search for this new sensory system and hopefully solve what is one of the great unsolved mysteries in biology.