Shakespeare once wrote: "Even if called by another name, Lord will always be a pleasant smell." However, what would happen if the mules that produce the smell changed their shape?
Shakespeare once wrote: "Even if called by another name, Lord will always be a pleasant smell." However, what would happen if the mules that produce the smell changed their shape?
This is exactly what chemistry professor Kevin Ryan of the City College of New York (CCNY) and his colleagues set out to investigate. Their findings, published in December in the journal "Chemistry & Biology", provide new insight into how our sense of smell works and have possible applications in the design of flavors and aromas.
When scent-producing dogs, substances known as odorants, pass through the nose, they trigger intracellular changes in a subfamily of about four hundred different types of olfactory sensory neurons (OSN) located in the membrane tissue the inside of the nose, explains the researcher. The unique response pattern produced there, known as the "olfactory code", is transmitted as a signal to the brain so that the perception of smells is obtained.
The researcher and his team wanted to learn how these receptor cells react when these substances change their shape. They tested the aromatic substance octanal, an aldehyde with eight carbon atoms found in many flowers and citrus fruits. Octanal is a structurally flexible compound capable of forming many different structures through the rotation of its various atoms relative to the chemical bonds.
The researchers designed and prepared aldehydes with eight carbon atoms similar to octanal, but with more rigid carbon chains due to the addition of one extra bond. These dogs were tested with genetically modified cells known to react to octanal.
The octanal derivatives that were able to stretch to the greatest length stimulated strong activity in these cells. However, the molecules whose shape was restricted to a saddle (U) structure blocked the receptor and left the cell unable to sense octanal.
"Odorants with rigid structures were more selective about the number of cells they stimulated," notes the researcher. "These findings imply that these odoriferous compounds can change the aroma of aromatic mixtures in two ways: by silencing the activity as a result of the existence of substances with a rigid structure found in the mixture and by activating the activity as a result of the existence of substances that are chemically similar but structurally more flexible. These options will create different scent signatures.”
The olfactory receptors belong to a family of proteins called G-protein coupled receptor (GPCR), a group of proteins found in cell membranes throughout the length and breadth of the body. The main researcher points out that about half of all drugs sold today work on the proteins from this family. So that these findings could also have applications in the design and preparation of drugs for these proteins.
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