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Olfactory receptors are able to detect air-borne odour molecules that enter the nasal cavity and bind to olfactory receptors. The activation of olfactory receptors results in olfactory receptor neurons sending an impulse to the brain’s olfactory system.
Precise odor delivery shows that moth pheromone sensitive olfactory receptor neurons are capable of very fast response to odor offset. Adaptation of the neurons on two different time scales is necessary to reproduce the response time course.
How animals sense and properly avoid predators remains incompletely understood. Here, Jiang et al. show that the B cell co-receptor, CD20 also functions as an olfactory receptor and mediates the innate avoidance of predator derived odors.
When choosing equal breeding sites, gravid Aedes aegypti aggregate more often than expected. This aggregation depends on the number of females present and involves a density-regulated avoidance response that relies on Orco and the CO2 receptor, Gr3.
Messenger RNAs transcribed from olfactory-receptor genes may have non-coding functions that include recruitment of transcriptional enhancers and inhibition of potentially thousands of competing alleles to ensure stable transcription of a single allele.
As conversion of odor signals to a two-dimensional map of activated glomeruli in the olfactory bulb is the key to odor recognition, decoding and deorphanizing of odorant receptors in the olfactory map is of great interest. Two genome-wide techniques now offer the ability to pair any odorant with its receptors.
Olfactory receptors signal through G protein βγ subunits to silence the expression of other olfactory receptors within a single olfactory sensory neuron.
