Department of Genetics and Evolution, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Geneva Neuroscience Center, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Nat Neurosci. 2015 Oct;18(10):1455-63. doi: 10.1038/nn.4100. Epub 2015 Aug 31.
In mammals, olfactory perception is based on the combinatorial activation of G protein-coupled receptors. Identifying the full repertoire of receptors activated by a given odorant in vivo, a quest that has been hampered for over 20 years by technical difficulties, would represent an important step in deciphering the rules governing chemoperception. We found that odorants induced a fast and reversible concentration-dependent decrease in the transcription of genes corresponding to activated receptors in intact mice. On the basis of this finding, we developed a large-scale transcriptomic approach to uncover receptor-ligand pairs in vivo. We identified the mouse and rat odorant receptor signatures corresponding to specific odorants. Finally, we found that this approach, which can be used for species for which no genomic sequence is available, is also applicable to non-vertebrate species such as Drosophila.
在哺乳动物中，嗅觉感知基于 G 蛋白偶联受体的组合激活。鉴定出一种特定气味在体内激活的全部受体，这是一个 20 多年来一直受到技术困难阻碍的探索，这将是破解化学感知规则的重要一步。我们发现，气味会在完整的小鼠中快速且可逆地引起与被激活受体相对应的基因转录的浓度依赖性降低。基于这一发现，我们开发了一种大规模的转录组学方法来揭示体内的受体-配体对。我们确定了对应于特定气味的小鼠和大鼠气味受体特征。最后，我们发现，这种方法可用于基因组序列不可用的物种，也适用于非脊椎动物物种，如果蝇。
