A molecular mechanism that enables worms to distinguish different odors has been discovered. For soil-dwelling nematodes that depend primarily on olfaction for survival, the ability to smell or not to smell may be the difference between life and death. However, scientists have been baffled by how
A molecular mechanism that enables worms to distinguish different odors has been discovered.
“The worms have an incredible sense of smell — it’s absolutely amazing,” says Daniel Merritt, a first co-author on the paper and a newly minted Ph.D. graduate from the van der Kooy lab following his thesis defense last week. Yet, the worms can discriminate between different smells sensed by the same neuron. Pioneering research from the early 1990s showed that when exposed to two attractive odors, where one is uniformly present and the other is localized, the worms crawl towards the latter. But how this behavior is regulated at the molecular level remained unclear.
They also had a hunch about how this could work at the molecular level. A protein named arrestin is a well-established desensitizer of the so-called- G protein-coupled receptors , a large family of proteins that perceive external stimuli, to which odorant receptors belong to. Arrestins for example allow us to adjust vision in bright light by damping down signaling through the photon-sensing receptors in the retina.
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