Olfactory Receptor - Mechanism

Mechanism

Rather than binding specific ligands, olfactory receptors display affinity for a range of odor molecules, and conversely a single odorant molecule may bind to a number of olfactory receptors with varying affinities. Once the odorant has bound to the odor receptor, the receptor undergoes structural changes and it binds and activates the olfactory-type G protein on the inside of the olfactory receptor neuron. The G protein (G_olf and/or G_s) in turn activates the lyase - adenylate cyclase - which converts ATP into cyclic AMP (cAMP). The cAMP opens cyclic nucleotide-gated ion channels which allow calcium and sodium ions to enter into the cell, depolarizing the olfactory receptor neuron and beginning an action potential which carries the information to the brain.

The primary sequences of thousands of olfactory receptors (ORs) are known from the genomes of more than a dozen organisms: they are seven-helix transmembrane proteins, but there are (as of July 2011) no known structures of any OR. There is a highly conserved sequence in roughly three quarters of all ORs that is a tripodal metal ion binding site, and Suslick has proposed that the ORs are in fact metalloproteins (mostly likely with zinc, copper and possibly manganese ions) that serve as a Lewis Acid site for binding of many odorant molecules.

In a recent but highly controversial interpretation, it has also been speculated that olfactory receptors might really sense various vibrational energy-levels of a molecule rather than structural motifs via quantum coherence mechanisms. As evidence it has been shown that flies can differentiate between two odor molecules which only differ in hydrogen isotope (which will drastically change vibrational energy levels of the molecule). Not only could the flies distinguish between the deuterated and non-deuterated forms of an odorant, they could generalise the property of "deuteratedness" to other novel molecules. In addition, they generalised the learned avoidance behaviour to molecules which were not deuterated but did share a significant vibration stretch with the deuterated molecules, a fact which the differential physics of deuteration (below) has difficulty in accounting for.

It should be noted, however, that deuteration changes the heats of adsorption and the boiling and freezing points of molecules (boiling points: 100.0°C for H₂O vs. 101.42°C for D₂O; melting points: 0.0°C for H₂O, 3.82°C for D₂O), pKa (i.e., dissociation constant: 9.71x10−15 for H₂0 vs. 1.95x10−15 for D₂O, cf. heavy water) and the strength of hydrogen bonding. Such isotope effects are exceedingly common, and so it is well known that deuterium substitution will indeed change the binding constants of molecules to protein receptors.