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This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher and Daljata.

The songbirds can migrate for thousands of miles across the globe. And they have a lot of tools to help them find their way.

They can use the stars, they can use the sun, they can use smell, they can use landmarks, they can use more or less anything that will help them.

Henrik Moetsen is a biologist at the University of Oldenburg in Germany.

Together with an international team of scientists, he investigated another sense birds can use to help them, which is the Earth's magnetic field.

Peter Hoer is a physical chemist on that team at the University of Oxford in the UK.

We know that the magnetic sensors are in the bird's eyes and their retinus. The most likely molecule was the protein cryptochrome.

But here's what they didn't know. How does that light-sensitive protein cryptochrome actually help the bird's sense magnetic fields?

To find out, they made some, starting with the genome of a European Robin, which is a migratory species.

Basically, we have taken the genetic code from a night migratory songbird, put it into a bacteria cell culture,

ask this cell culture to make this protein, and then we send this protein to Oxford.

Moetsen's colleagues in Oxford then shined blue light on those protein samples, which transformed them into magnetically sensitive molecules.

As they did that, they exposed the proteins to a magnetic field, which caused two competing chemical reactions to occur.

In fact, the strength of that magnetic field influences how many of the proteins go down one of those chemical reaction pathways versus the other.

Now, what happens next in a bird's eye isn't totally clear, but they think one of those magnetically sensitive reactions produces a form of the protein with a different shape, which might cause it to interact differently with other proteins in the bird's cells.

In that in turn, might trigger a cascade of messaging, which would allow the bird to sense the magnetic field.

We also have some indications that it looks like the migratory bird cryptochromes might be more sensitive to magnetic fields than a chicken cryptochrome, for instance, which doesn't migrate.

And that's just one more piece of evidence that the cryptochrome protein might underpin the Robin's magnetic sense, the findings appear in the journal Nature.

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