A Proposal for an Electron-Transfer Mechanism of Avian Magnetoreception

Abstract

In spite of many years of research, the mechanism of avian magnetoreception remains a mystery due to its seemingly insurmountable intricacies. Recently Xie and colleagues proposed that IscA1 can act as a protein biocompass due to the measured intrinsic ferromagneticity, and thus named it MagR. However, Meister's calculations showed that the interaction energy of the magnetic moment of IscA1 with Earth's magnetic field is five magnitudes smaller than thermal fluctuation at room temperature. The other long-proposed compass protein is cryptochrome (Cry) with a mechanism of forming singlet-triplet radical pairs. However, this sensory mechanism still has no inferable information transmission routes. We propose a magnetoreception mechanism involving both the Cry and IscA1 proteins, through which photoinduced electrons are transported to redox-regulated ion channels to provoke neuronal responses. The structural features of the Cry-IscA1 complex that make it suitable for long-range electron transfer are discussed and how the magnetic effect leads to neuronal activity is described.