Hiro Matsunami (Duke Univ.), a leading scientist in the field of the olfactory system, kindly accepted to give us a seminar on October 3rd (Tuesday) at 15h00 in the Salle Trégouboff. The title of his talk and its abstract are as follows.
Abstract: Mammalian odorant receptors (ORs) have gone through unique evolutionary history involving massive gene duplications followed by functional diversification. Our understanding of functional diversification of ORs that enable to detect and discriminate tens of thousands of environmental chemicals is limited as the majority of the mammalian ORs remained as “orphan” without well-characterized cognate odorous ligands. We developed in vitro and in vivo methods to identify new odorous ligands for ORs, which afforded us a new opportunity to study OR ligand selectivity, signal transduction and functional evolution.
Image : Credit: J. McGann and M. Wachowiak