How can mice recognise close relatives?

You may be curious about why mice can recognise close relatives even some of them have never encountered before. The mystery has been unlocked by researchers from the University of Liverpool.
The researchers published a study in Current Biology demonstrating that a species-specific genetic marker called the major urinary protein (MUP), which is detected through the animal's scent, is used by female house mice to select closely related females as nest partners to help look after their offspring. To their astonishment, another scent-based genetic marker, the vertebrate-wide major histocompatibility complex (MHC), is not involved in kin recognition. It was thought to determine how most animals recognise their relatives before.
It proves that animals, including people, tend to cooperating with close relatives because it increases the odds of the genes that they share with relatives being passed to the next generation.
Female house mice usually select relatives as nest partners regardless of prior familiarity, but the genetic markers involved in this recognition have proven extremely difficult to identify.
"This work extends far beyond any previous attempt to identify the genetic basis of kin recognition in vertebrates and strongly challenges the current assumption that there is a common kin-recognition mechanism 'inbuilt' into the immune physiology of all vertebrates," said Professor Jane Hurst, from the University's Institute of Integrative Biology and lead author of the study.
Te researchers are preparing to investigate if other species have evolved similar genetic markers to recognise their relatives and whether these signals evolve only in species that cooperate with relatives to increase their breeding success.
To understand the importance of social groupings in populations can also have implications for captive breeding programmes and help those animals cooperate better.
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