Topic: vomeronasal organ (VNO)

Social memory plays a crucial role in the behavioural dynamics of gregarious animals, facilitating interaction, recognition, and appropriate social responses among conspecifics. Specifically, male mice demarcate their territory using urine marks, rich in pheromonal cues, allowing females to discern territorial ownership—a critical factor in mate selection. This recognition process forms distinct engrams, or biological memory traces, for individual conspecifics. Pheromonal signals are primarily processed by the vomeronasal organ (VNO), transmitted through the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB), and