My Yahoo!The Secrets of Scent
From the lowly nose, Linda Buck unravels the mysteries of how the brain works.
Imagine a bathroom in a subway station that isn't sickeningly smelly. Or drugs that keep cancer patients from losing their appetites or tinker with the wiring in your brain to help you overcome fear. Or a machine that can sniff out explosives with greater accuracy than a pack of police dogs. These things and more may grow out of the work Linda Buck is doing to understand the way our senses of smell and taste operate. Buck, an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), has spent 14 years trying to unravel the mysteries of the olfactory system.
"The first question," she says, "is how do mammals detect such an enormous variety of odors. The second question is how does the nervous system translate so many different chemical structures into different perceptions and behaviors."
Buck's first breakthrough came in 1991 when, as a senior postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's College of Physicians & Surgeons, she and her mentor, Richard Axel, identified the genes that contain the blueprints for the receptors in the nose that identify odors. Working with rats, Axel and Buck pinpointed 1,000 types of "olfactory receptors" located in the back of the nose, on a spot called the olfactory epithelium. Receptors are protein molecules that sit on the surface of cells in the nose. They recognize scents by binding to molecules on particular odorants. Receptors work the same way in humans, though we have fewer of them--350 compared with 1,000 in mice.
In the geeky, fiercely competitive world of neurobiology, the identification of olfactory receptors was huge news. Scientists had been baffled for years trying to figure out how the humble old schnozz performs its miracles. "It was remarkable. They discovered something that for many years had remained a big mystery: How does the sense of smell work?" says Solomon Snyder, director of the department of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. His lab had tried and failed to identify those same receptors in the 1980s.
What really blew people away, Snyder says, was the huge number of genes dedicated to odor detection. Of the 50,000 or so genes in the genome, nobody expected that 1,000 would be handling odor detection. "You're talking about 2% of the entire genome, all devoted to smell. It's incredible," Snyder says. "It still doesn't make any sense. Why have a thousand odor receptors? We don't know the real answer."
For Buck the breakthrough represented the payoff for three years of round-the-clock work in the lab at Columbia. "I was putting in 12 to 15 hours a day," she says. "Basically I just got up and went to the lab, and stayed there until the wee hours of the morning. I only went home to sleep."
So what does Buck's breakthrough have to do with making public restrooms smell better? It's a bit speculative, but once scientists understand how receptors work, they can in theory use chemical agents to switch them on or off. Pump the subway station full of molecules that switch off the receptors that pick up nasty odors, and you can, in effect, neutralize an assault on your nose. "You can make antagonists to bad smells," Snyder says. "It's not that far-fetched."
That's why International Flavors & Fragrances (nyse: IFF - news - people ), maker of perfumes and other products, sponsored Snyder's lab for a decade and why Buck gets support from National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense. One possible defense application: Identify the receptors that dogs use to detect explosives, clone them and create a bomb-sniffing machine. Scientists could block receptors to help obese people stop craving food. Or they could stimulate receptors to help anorexics and cancer patients start shoveling it down.
Buck will leave that work to others. She and her team are focused on the underlying biology.
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