English

DTIC ADA384283: Molecular Mechanisms of Odor Recognition

The principal thrust of our work focused on molecular mechanisms of chemoreception in the mammalian vomeronasal organ. We characterized the transduction pathway for the recognition of pheromones in the vomeronasal organ and also characterized subpopulations of olfactory neurons expressing different axonal G proteins in the main and accessory olfactory projections. These studies were extended with a characterization of genetically modified mice deficient in the alpha subunit of the G-protein, Go, which show profound anosmia. In addition to studies on the mammalian olfactory system, grant DAAH04-96-I-0096 enabled us to expand work on the genomic architecture of olfactory behavior in Drosophila melanogaster. This work led to the discovery of several new gene products that are essential for processing olfactory information, including a sodium channel, a novel dual specificity tyrosine phosphorylation regulated kinase (Dyrk2), a postsynaptic density protein (Scribble), an olfactory receptor, and an odorant binding protein, the latter two interacting with the repellent odorant, benzaldehyde. Finally, we continued work on olfactomedin. We showed that a family of olfactomedin-related prote

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