Pigeons navigate with ‘gut feeling’ powered by paramagnetic liver cells, study suggests

Scientists in Germany have shown that liver macrophages – the white blood cells that destroy pathogens and help clear cellular waste – could play a role in giving pigeons a ‘gut feeling’ to find their way home. The work could help explain how some animals are able to navigate by sensing magnetic fields.

Many animals are thought to use the Earth’s magnetic field as an internal compass, particularly in low-light conditions or at night when they can’t rely on visual cues and the sun to orient themselves. However, this magnetoreception ability is not well understood and studies in birds have proposed different mechanisms to explain how animals are able to detect magnetic fields, such as light sensitive proteins in the eye, iron ions in birds’ beaks or cellular ion channels that change in response to magnetic fields.

Clivia Lisowski and her team at the Institute for Molecular Medicine and Experimental Immunology have now proposed a new mechanism for magnetoreception, based on iron nanoparticles that are found in macrophages in the liver.