Main compounds in sweat, such as squalene and fatty acids, should be promising pheromone components for humans

Abstract

Pheromones are chemicals released outside the body by organisms to transmit information between individuals of the same species, thereby regulating behavior and physiology. Many biological and psychological studies have shown that human sweat does indeed contain chemical information related to gender, sex, emotion, etc., but there is no convincing answer to its chemical components. We conducted a GC-MS analysis of the chemical composition of adult and child sweat of Han Chinese, and found that the main components were squalene and fatty acids, and there were sex differences in adults, but not in children. Based on our long-term research on the coding rules of pheromones in a variety of animals, especially rodents, as well as men having more sweat glands and sebaceous glands, we speculate that squalene and many common fatty acids are likely to encode olfactory information such as sex and emotion in one component or a mix of components or in a dose-dependent manner. We also discussed that the main olfactory system and olfactory learning in social interactions should play an important role in human pheromone perception.