A huge congrats to Paul and Dan (and to everyone else in the
lab whose hard work helped with the story) on their recent publication on a new
family of chemoreceptors expressed in the mouse olfactory system. This paper,
published last month in Cell, revises the canonical view of how mammalian
olfaction works by identifying a new receptor family (called the MS4As) that do
not encode seven-transmembrane-containing g-protein coupled receptors (like all
other known mammalian chemoreceptor families) but instead encode proteins with only
four transmembrane domains. These receptors, which respond to a wide variety of
ethologically-relevant odors, including attractive food cues and aversive
pheromones, are all co-expressed in the neurons in which they are expressed. These
observations, in additional to being incredibly provocative, raise all sorts of
interesting questions now being addressed in the lab: about the role of the
MS4As in sensory perception; about the modes of coding and decoding of sensory
information in the “necklace” system, the subsystem in which the MS4As are
expressed; about the brain circuits attached to MS4A-expressing neurons in the
nose; and about the behavioral consequences of activating the MS4A receptors. Lots
of great stuff in the paper itself, which you can check out
here! You can see
coverage of these findings
here,
here and
here.
And Lisa Stowers wrote a really nice (and generous!) preview of the article for Cell found
here!