Aging takes its toll on sex appeal and now an international team of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Michigan find that in fruit flies, at least, it even diminishes the come-hither effect of the chemicals of love - pheromones.

"This is new because we have direct evidence that the pheromones produced at these different ages affect sexual attractiveness differently," said Tsung-Han Kuo, a graduate student in the department of molecular and human genetics and the Huffington Center on Aging at BCM. Kuo is first author of the report that appears online in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Pheromones are chemicals produced by an organism to communicate or attract another. In this case, Drosophila melanogaster or fruit flies produce chemicals called cuticular hydrocarbons.

Special mass spectrometry studies that looked in detail at the composition and level of production of these hydrocarbons showed that they differed between the sexes, but more important, they changed with age.