The olfactory epithelium is extensively innervated by sympathetic nerve endings, which release norepinephrine, and parasympathetic nerve endings, which release acetylcholine. Because olfactory sensory neurons have adrenergic and muscarinic receptors in addition to odorant receptors, autonomic stimulation can modulate the responses of olfactory sensory neurons to odorants. Recent studies have sh...

Odorant cues are recognized by receptors expressed on olfactory sensory neurons, the primary sensory neurons of the olfactory epithelium. Odorant receptors typically obey the "one receptor, one neuron" rule, in which the receptive field of the olfactory neuron is determined by the singular odorant receptor that it expresses. Odor-evoked receptor activity across the population of olfactory neuro...

Chemical recognition is essential for survival and reproduction. Adaptive evolution has resulted in diverse chemoreceptor families, in which polymorphisms contribute to individual variation in chemosensation. To gain insights into the genetic determinants of individual variation in odorant recognition, we measured olfactory responses to two structurally similar odorants in a population of wild-...

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...

A multi-gene family of ~1000 G protein-coupled olfactory receptors (ORs) constitutes the molecular basis of mammalian olfaction. Due to the lack of structural data its remarkable capacity to detect and discriminate thousands of odorants remains poorly understood on the structural level of the receptor. Using site-directed mutagenesis we transferred ligand specificity between two functionally re...

Animals use their odorant receptors to receive chemical information from the environment. Insect odorant receptors differ from the G protein-coupled odorant receptors in vertebrates and nematodes, and very little is known about their protein-protein interactions. Here, we introduce a mass spectrometric platform designed for the large-scale analysis of insect odorant receptor protein-protein int...

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 ...