A recent research has been able to nail down individual magnetic cells in trout, which is being used by fish to reach their hatching ground. It has been claimed by a team of researchers led by Michael Winklhofer, from Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich), that there are fair chances that these findings would be able to reveal a lot more about what makes living creatures so vulnerable to magnetic fields.

It was also claimed that though researchers were very much aware of fish and bird tissue having magnetic material, this is for the first time that individual cells laden with magnetite were found. "The field penetrates the whole organism, so such cells could be located almost anywhere, making them hard to identify”, said Michael Winklhofer, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For the research, the team used the olfactory epithelium of rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss), and concluded with tracking down single magnetoresponsive cells. The team was surprised to know that the magnetic field of the cells was far stronger than earlier believed. Perhaps that’s what makes the cells extremely sensitive magnetically.

It is believed that this study might be able to able to pave ways for the development of highly sensitive magnetometers in the time to come.