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Chromosomes come together to help mice distinguish odours

A study shows that a multi-chromosomal hub assembles in mouse olfactory neurons to ensure that only one odour-sensing receptor is expressed in each neuron — a feature essential to odour discrimination.
  1. François Spitz

    1. François Spitz is in the Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, Institut Pasteur and CNRS UMR3738, Paris 75015, France.

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Mammals can discriminate between a vast number of volatile compounds — perhaps more than a trillion1. This extraordinary capacity is encoded by a repertoire of hundreds of olfactory-receptor genes, distributed in small groups that are present on almost all chromosomes2. To ensure that the response to individual odours is specific, each olfactory sensory neuron (OSN) expresses a single, randomly selected olfactory-receptor gene. Writing in Nature, Monahan et al.3 show that, in the nuclei of mouse OSNs, certain regions of multiple chromosomes assemble in a structure that controls the expression of the full repertoire of olfactory-receptor genes in the nose, while making sure that each cell expresses only one type of receptor. These exciting findings show that interchromosomal interactions can have a determinant role in regulating gene expression.

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Nature 565, 439-440 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00010-6

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