Email: peter.hore@chem.ox.ac.uk
Websites:
http://hore.chem.ox.ac.uk/index.shtml
https://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/people/peter-hore
https://www.quantumbirds.eu/
Personal Biography
I have spent most of my life at Oxford University, as Chemistry student (1973-1980), Junior Research Fellow (1982-83), Fellow of Corpus Christi College (1983-2023), and Professor of Chemistry (1983-present). My only time away from Oxford was as a postdoc at the University of Groningen (1980–82).
Research
Over the years I have worked on a number of topics around magnetic resonance and the effects of electron and nuclear spins on chemical reactivity, an area known as Spin Chemistry. These include spin hyperpolarization, protein structure and folding, photosynthetic energy conversion, and NMR methodology. Since about 2005 I have been trying to unravel the biophysical mechanism that allows migratory songbirds to detect the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field as an aid to navigation.
Selected Publications
Chemical compass model of avian magnetoreception
K. Maeda et al. Nature 453 (2008) 387–390
Anthropogenic electromagnetic noise disrupts magnetic compass orientation in a migratory bird
S. Engels et al. Nature 509 (2014) 353–356
The radical-pair mechanism of magnetoreception
P. J. Hore and H. Mouritsen, Annu. Rev. Biophys. 45 (2016) 299-344
Magnetic sensitivity of cryptochrome 4 from a migratory songbird
Xu et al. Nature, 594 (2021) 535-540
Upper bound for broadband radiofrequency field disruption of magnetic compass orientation in night-migratory songbirds
B. Leberecht et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 120 (2023) e2301153120
No evidence for magnetic field effects on the behaviour of Drosophila
M. Bassetto et al. Nature 620 (2023) 595-599
A complete list can be found here.
I have also written two Oxford Chemistry Primers:
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (2015)
NMR: The Toolkit (2015, with Jonathan Jones & Steve Wimperis)
Non-technical articles and lectures
The Radical Pair Mechanism of Magnetoreception (FENS-Hertie Winter School, Neural Control of Behaviour: Navigation, Obergurgl, 2017)
A Quantum Christmas Robin. Why migrating birds don’t get lost (Schools’ Christmas Chemistry Conference, Oxford, 2023)
The quantum nature of bird migration (Scientific American, 2022)
Spin chemistry in living systems (National Science Review, 2024)