Aphids heavily rely on their olfactory system for foraging behavior. Odorant-degrading enzymes (ODEs) are essential in preserving the acuity of aphids by removing redundant odorants antennae. Certain within this group stand out as being enriched and/or biased expressed antennae, such carboxylesterases (CXEs), cytochrome P450 (CYPs), glutathione S-transferases (GSTs), and UDP-glycosyltransferase...

We are pleased to present a series of Annotated Classics celebrating 40 years of exciting biology in the pages of Cell. This installment revisits “A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognition” by Linda Buck and Richard Axel. Here, Stuart Firestein, Charles Greer, and Peter Mombaerts comment on many discoveries foreshadowed by the identification o...

Pheromone-sensitive sensilla trichodea of nine moth species belonging to six families and three superfamilies of Lepidoptera were immunolabelled with an antiserum against the pheromone-binding protein of Antheraea polyphemus. Strong immunolabelling of the sensillum lymph was observed in all long sensilla trichodea of A. polyphemus, A. pernyi (Saturniidae), Bombyx mori (Bombycidae) and Manduca s...

Coding of information in the peripheral olfactory system depends on two fundamental : interaction of individual odors with subsets of the odorant receptor repertoire and mode of signaling that an individual receptor-odor interaction elicits, activation or inhibition. We develop a cheminformatics pipeline that predicts receptor-odorant interactions from a large collection of chemical structures ...

Odorant binding proteins (Obps) are remarkable in their number, diversity, and abundance, yet their role in olfactory coding remains unclear. They are widely believed to be required for transporting hydrophobic odorants through an aqueous lymph to odorant receptors. We construct a map of the Drosophila antenna, in which the abundant Obps are mapped to olfactory sensilla with defined functions. ...

Olfactory sensory neurons in the main olfactory epithelium (MOE) are responsible for detecting odorants and EOG recording is a reliable approach to analyze the peripheral olfactory function. However, recently we revealed that rodent MOE can also detect the air pressure caused by airflow. The sensation of airflow pressure and odorants may function in synergy to facilitate odorant perception duri...