Olfactory Receptor - Discovery

Discovery

In 2004 Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on olfactory receptors. In 2006 it was shown that another class of odorant receptors exist for volatile amines. This class of receptors consists of the trace amine-associated receptors (TAAR) with the exception of TAAR1 which is a receptor for thyronamines.

Unfortunately, as with many other GPCRs, there is still a lack of experimental structures at atomic level for olfactory receptors and structural information is based on homology modeling methods.

Read more about this topic:  Olfactory Receptor

Famous quotes containing the word discovery:

    One of the laudable by-products of the Freudian quackery is the discovery that lying, in most cases, is involuntary and inevitable—that the liar can no more avoid it than he can avoid blinking his eyes when a light flashes or jumping when a bomb goes off behind him.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.... It is all the more serious since, with the loss of my rule V, not only the foundations of my arithmetic, but also the sole possible foundations of arithmetic seem to vanish.
    Gottlob Frege (1848–1925)