Two articles in Nature and Science that address fine points of signal transduction in olfactory neurons--the cellular pathways that get turned on in response to an odor--have far-reaching implications in the field of olfaction. The Nature piece (347:184-7, Sept. 13, 1990) moves researchers closer to isolating the elusive odor receptor. The article in Science (249:1166-8, Sept. 7, 1990) helps quell a controversy about whether olfaction transduction involves one or two pathways; the results show that it follows two. "Different odors depend on different pathways," says Randall Reed, an associate professor of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and one of the authors of the Nature paper. "Pleasant ones seem to prefer one way, unpleasant ones, the other." Reed and his group were the first to clone and sequence an ion channel in an olfactory neuron. His results indicate that even a third pathway may be activated ...
Olfaction Scientists: Sniffing Out Some New Applications
A wide range of scientific challenges spawns a surge in basic research for this once unacclaimed discipline Most researchers long believed that the sense of smell was genetically determined and, therefore, unchangeable. But at least one scientist--Charles Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia--doubted this theory. Wysocki, a psychobiologist who investigates the genetics of olfaction in the 45 percent of the adult population who can't detect androstenone, a component in s
Written byRobin Eisner
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