2014 Volume 83 Issue 1 Pages 43-47
In olfaction, the repertoire of receptors that detect sensory stimuli as sensors, is more than 100-fold higher than in color vision. The large variation in olfactory receptors may be attributable to both the structural variation of odorants and the difficulty in odorant discrimination based on a specific binding of a given odorant to its most sensitive receptor, due to the intermolecular interaction between the odorant and the receptor being weaker than that of neurotransmitters. Signal summation among multiple receptors may be required to extract the elemental information characteristic of a given stimulus, because a concentration range where only a single type of receptor detects the odorant is usually very narrow. In the olfactory neural pathway, there should be a hierarchical information processing system to automatically enhance characteristic signals from the most sensitive and specific receptors for odor representation with signals from greatly overlapping receptors. We introduce our recent research regarding the receptor codes for odors.
