LOS ANGELES, April 29 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers have created the first detailed map of smell receptors in the nose, marking a major advance in understanding olfaction and bringing it closer to similar progress made in vision, hearing and touch, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Cell.
The map shows that smell receptors are highly organized into tight, overlapping bands based on receptor type, challenging the long-standing view that their distribution in the nasal cavity is largely random.
The findings provide foundational knowledge that could help pave the way for future therapies for loss of smell, the study said.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School worked in mice to map the organization of more than 1,000 types of olfactory receptors in the nose. They combined single-cell sequencing and spatial transcriptomics to analyze around 5.5 million neurons from more than 300 mice.
The study found that neurons expressing different smell receptors are not randomly distributed, but instead show strong spatial organization, forming overlapping horizontal stripes from the top to the bottom of the nasal cavity according to receptor type.
"Our results bring order to a system that was previously thought to lack order, which changes conceptually how we think this works," said Sandeep Robert Datta, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the study.
The researchers also found that the receptor map in the nose corresponds with smell-processing maps in the olfactory bulb of the brain, offering clues about how odor information is transmitted.
Datta noted that the smell map provides foundational information that could help scientists develop therapies for loss of smell, which are currently lacking. ■
