Mice cloned from olfactory cells
... to randomly express any one of some 1,500 diverse odor receptor genes. Such genes give rise to the protein receptors on the surface of the neurons that detect specific chemical odorants.In their efforts, the researchers in Axel's laboratory generated mice with olfactory sensory neurons tagged using genet...Rockefeller University scientists take on controversial 'vibration theory' of smell
...eory favored by most scientists, that shape of the odor molecule is the most important determinant of its ... smell depends on intramolecular vibrations of the odor molecule - basically the characteristic "stretching" of its chemical bonds and not the shape of mole...AChemS: Cutting edge research in taste, smell, & chemical irritation
... emotional event experienced in the presence of an odor can impact the perception of that odor upon future encounters. While investigating this phenomenon in the laboratory, we have observed that...Study in flies allows researchers to visualize formation of a memory
... They then exposed the flies to brief puffs of an odor while they received a shock. This caused them to learn a new association between the odor and the shock a type of learning called classical conditioning. Using a high-powered microscope to ...Study helps satellites measure Great Lakes' water quality
...vels are too high, water takes on a foul taste and odor that isnt easily removed by traditional treatment methods. Some forms of algae, such as one called microcystis, are toxic when consumed in large quantities. Though it can be filtered out of drinking water, microcystis can kill fish and birds, and coa...Espionage may have driven the evolution of bee language according to UCSD-led study in Brazil
... location, detected and preferentially oriented to odor marks deposited by a competitor and then rapidly d... both species were able to distinguish their kin's odor marks from the marks of the other species. "The victim species preferred their own odor marks ...A fly's taste experience is much like our own
...ctory sensory system. The latter uses 50 different odor detectors to discriminate among thousands of smells, while the 68 taste receptors are reduced to only a few different taste categories in the fly brain. Taste is geared mainly to locating food and deciding whether or not to eat it, without any fine t...Yale scientists decipher odor code
...logy at Yale University, systematically tested the odor receptor proteins in the fruit fly antenna and rec...of humans and the antennae of insects contain many odor receptor proteins, but it was previously not known how the entire collection of receptors act togeth...New study in moths shows insects not entirely ruled by instinct
...ore, during and after training the animal that one odor meant food sugar water was on the way and another odor did not. "We saw a dramatic restructuring of the neural networks that convert scent into a code that...Virginia Tech's smelly 'corpse plant' due to bloom Aug. 4
...omed in August 2002, drawing crowds who braved the odor and the football traffic to see it. The smelly pla...d compound in the flower stalk so the carrion-like odor will spread several feet away from the plant to attract pollinators. The plant blooms seldom because...Infant rats eagerly accept high concentrations of alcohol upon first exposure
...fant's bottle. In addition, exposure to alcohol's odor is likely when parents drink; it is known that this makes alcohol's odor more or less attractive to these children, depending on the circumstances of the drinking. The dang...Essential smell gene may provide key to new insect repellents
...the cell dendrites, where they would be exposed to odor molecules in the air, they were clustered in the cell body. Finally, they tested whether the nerve cells with incorrectly located smell receptors were activated in the presence of odors such as rosy-smelling 2-phenylethanol and methyl salicylate, whi...Wrapping a memory with an experience, capacity for recollection detected in non-human species
...ed by varying the difficulty of responding to each odor and by varying the food "payoffs" for correct iden...earchers to measure the ratio of correct and false odor identifications across a range of bias conditions, generating the ROC curve. The shape of this curv...Serotonin metabolites in mollusks suggest pathways for human therapies
...king with the serotonin pathways that underlie the odor learning." Stuart reported at the ACS meeting that hungry Pleurobranchaea had more serotonin sulfate, one of the newly discovered serotonin metabolites, which could indicate that serotonin sulfate is a signal for hunger. Stuart and Jason Ebaugh, a do...