ABOVE: Healthy zebrafish olfactory epithelium (left) compared to experimentally damaged olfactory epithelium (right)
CALVO-OCHOA ET AL.
After people suffer damage to the olfactory bulb due to a traumatic brain injury or stroke, they often experience problems with their sense of smell. The olfactory bulb is connected by neurons to the olfactory epithelium, specialized cells found in the lining of the nose that help us smell. Recovery from the damage is a slow and often incomplete process in people. “Individuals suffering acute brain damage rarely achieve full functional recovery, since mammalian brains have a very limited capacity to repair and regenerate neurons,” Erika Calvo-Ochoa, a postdoc in the lab of Christine Byrd-Jacobs at Western Michigan University, says in an email to The Scientist. Byrd-Jacobs’s lab studies damage to the olfactory epithelium in zebrafish caused by brain injury. Calvo-Ochoa injects zebrafish olfactory bulbs with quinolinic acid, a chemical that causes neuron death in ...
