Rodents mate choice

D Udine, B., and Alieva, E., 1983, Early experience and sexual preferences in rodents, "Mate Choice," P. Bateson, ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 

Although the mechanism for HLA-based mate choice in humans is not known, MHC-based mate choice preferences in rodents are olfactory mediated (reviewed in Alberts Ober, 1993). In humans, evidence for MHC-based olfactory recognition has recently been presented by Wedekind and colleagues (Wedekind et. al., 1995, 1997). Despite the methodological limitations of these studies (Hedrick and Loeschcke, 1996), the results are consistent with the data from rodent studies and suggest that humans may indeed use olfactory cues to discriminate between persons similar and dissimilar in the MHC. This premise has been bolstered recently by the identification of a family of olfactory receptor genes (OLF) that map within the human MHC (Fan et al., 1996), but additional studies are needed to determine whether preferences for mates with dissimilar HLA haplotypes in the Hutterites are indeed mediated by olfactory cues. 

Recent research has shown that among humans MHC type plays a role in the selection of heterosexual mates. Studies on the North American Hutterite community (a reproductively isolated, cultural and religious group of Austrian ancestry) revealed that mate choice was influenced by an avoidance of spouses with a high degree of haplotype overlap with self (Ober, this volume). In another study, Wedekind, Seebeck, Bettens and Paepke (1995), typed female and male students for their MHC haplotypes. Each male subject wore a T-shirt for two consecutive nights, after which the T-shirts were collected and placed in identical cardboard boxes for the female subjects to sniff and evaluate. For each female, half of the boxes contained T-shirts from men who were similar to her in MHC-type, and half contained T-shirts from men who were dissimilar. The results revealed that females who were not on birth control pills preferred the smell of males who were most dissimilar from them in MHC-type, indicating that female preferences for male body odor correlates with MHC dissimilarity. These women also reported that the body odor of the males they preferred reminded them of their current and/or ex-mates. Thus, as with rodents, human mate selection appears to be related to female preferences for male body odors that correlate with MHC dissimilarity (complementarity). 

Its availability, practicality in housing and in mating as well as its large size makes the rabbit the preferred choice as a non-rodent species. The study protocols are essentially similar to those established for the rat (Chapter 9), with some particularities. The study designs are well defined in guidelines and are relatively standardized between testing laboratories across the world. 

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