A Center of Excellence in
Marine Genomics

Chemical Senses: Olfaction

Making Sense of Smell

Our sense of smell is vital to our well-being. It is a major component of our sense of taste; it can readily evoke deep-founded memories (your grandfather's attic!); it can protect us from danger (smell of burning, rancid smells); or it can affect our mood (perfumes and aroma therapy). For the most part, however, we take our sense of smell for granted and only really appreciate it when we lose it, most commonly when we have a cold. For some people, however, the loss of the sense of smell is more permanent since it can occur after some head injuries, from prescriptive medicines taken for some disorders and, occasionally, during the first stages of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

The intriguing thing about our sense of smell is how it works. How does our nose take a bunch of chemicals floating in the air we breathe and turn them into a signal our brain tells us is "pizza"?

Knowing this could help those with temporary loss of smell (anosmia) or, inthe case for those with congenital anosmia, identify important molecules that could be targeted in the future by gene therapies.
It could also lead to the development of artificial "noses" that could be used as sensors for commercial and threat-detection purposes.

	In my lab, we seek to understand how the sense of smell works - what happens inside olfactory receptor cells in response to an odor. We use the noses of lobsters and mice for this work since each has its own experimental advantages and, together,
the two complement one another.