BACKGROUND The red turpentine beetle (RTB), Dendroctonus valens LeConte (Coleoptera: Curculionidae, Scolytinae), is a destructive invasive pest of conifers which has become the second most important forest pest nationwide in China. Dendroctonus valens is known to use host odors and aggregation pheromones, as well as non-host volatiles, in host location and mass-attack modulation, and thus anten...

Animals in complex environments must discriminate between salient and uninformative sensory cues. Caenorhabditis elegans uses one pair of olfactory neurons called AWC to sense many different odorants, yet the animal can distinguish each odorant from the others in discrimination assays. We demonstrate that the transmembrane guanylyl cyclase ODR-1 is essential for responses to all AWC-sensed odor...

The first reorganization of odor representations in the nervous system occurs at the synapse between olfactory receptor neurons and second-order neurons in olfactory bulb glomeruli. Signal transmission at this synapse is modulated presynaptically by several mechanisms, a major one being mediated by GABA(B) receptors, which suppress presynaptic calcium influx and subsequent transmitter release f...

Smell, the most ancient of all senses, is crucial for animal reproduction and survival. Humans can detect the most minute changes in odorant structures as a different perceived odor. Despite its significance, the mechanism of olfactory sensory perception remained unknown before 1991. Through research in my lab and others, we discovered a large multigene family containing approximately 1000 gene...

Natural odors typically consist of many molecules at different concentrations. It is unclear how the numerous odorant molecules and their possible mixtures are discriminated by relatively few olfactory receptors. Using an information theoretic model, we show that a receptor array is optimal for this task if it achieves two possibly conflicting goals: (i) Each receptor should respond to half of ...

We present here an exploration of the evolution of three well-established, web-based resources dedicated to the dissemination of information related to olfactory receptors (ORs) and their functional ligands, odorants. These resources are: the Olfactory Receptor Database (ORDB), the Human Olfactory Data Explorer (HORDE) and ODORactor. ORDB is a repository of genomic and proteomic information rel...

Odorant receptor mRNAs are transported within axons of olfactory sensory neurons that project into the olfactory bulb. Odorant receptor proteins have been identified along the distal part of these axons, which raises the possibility of their local synthesis in axons. We took advantage of the anatomical separation between the olfactory mucosa (which contains the sensory neuron cell bodies) and t...

Our understanding of mammalian olfactory coding has been impeded by the paucity of information about the odorant receptors (ORs) that respond to a given odorant ligand in awake, freely behaving animals. Identifying the ORs that respond in vivo to a given odorant ligand from among the ∼1100 ORs in mice is intrinsically challenging but critical for our understanding of olfactory coding at the per...