[MURG] [>Htech] sciencedaily: fruit fly odor map (fwd from alito@organicrobot.com)

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Alejandro Dubrovsky <alito at organicrobot.com> -----

From: Alejandro Dubrovsky <alito at organicrobot.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 19:33:31 +1000
To: transhumantech <transhumantech at yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [>Htech] sciencedaily:  fruit fly odor map
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(
http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/04-06-24-03.all.html
)


YALE News Release
CONTACT: Janet Rettig Emanuel, 203-432-2157, janet.emanuel at yale.edu #201

For Immediate Release: June 24, 2004

Yale Scientists Decipher Odor Code
New Haven, Conn. -- Yale scientists, working with the fruit fly as a
model, have discovered how odors are encoded by the olfactory system
into the complex messages that are sent to the brain. The study,
published in the June 25 issue of Cell, provides new insight into how
animals sense and distinguish odors, a process that is essential to
identifying food, mates and predators.

Graduate student Elissa Hallem and her advisor John Carlson, professor
in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at
Yale University, systematically tested the odor receptor proteins in the
fruit fly antenna and recorded which odors they detect. 

The noses 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 together to encode olfactory information.

Each fruit fly antenna has 32 odorant receptors, and Hallem and Carlson
used a mutant fruit fly to determine their individual odor
sensitivities. The antenna of their mutant fruit fly has an "empty"
nerve cell, or neuron, that has lost its original odor receptor and does
not respond to any odors. 

Using genetic engineering, Hallem and Carlson created a series of mutant
flies, each with a different fruit fly odor receptor in the previously
empty neuron. They then tested the engineered neuron in each fly for the
odor sensitivity of the receptor.

They found that some receptors responded strongly to many of the tested
odors, while others responded strongly to only one or none. Some odors
activated many receptors, and some odors activated only one. Some
receptors are able to respond in different ways to different odors --
activated by some odors and inhibited by others. 

"We were able to create a map of which odor receptor is expressed in
which type of neuron," said Hallem. According to Carlson, this
receptor-to-neuron map is the first map of its kind of the olfactory
system. 

"We hope that this map in the fruit fly will serve as a model for the
olfactory systems of insects such as mosquitoes that transmit disease as
well as for more complex organisms, including humans," said Carlson.

The work was supported by a National Science Foundation graduate
fellowship to Elissa Hallem, and by National Institutes of Health grants
and a McKnight Investigator Award to John Carlson; co-author Michael Ho,
was a Yale undergraduate. 

Citation: Cell 118(1): (June 25, 2004)

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