Life sciences
03 Nov 2016
Can you smell through your lungs?
by Liam Drew, Frontiers Science Writer It was always thought that olfactory receptors’ sole bodily function was to smell, and could only be found inside a nose. But now a new study, published in Frontiers in Physiology, has found two olfactory receptors in human lung tissue. And when the researchers from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany activated these receptors, they found that they regulated the way in which the airways smooth muscle cells contracted. Contraction of smooth muscle changes the size of our airways, suggesting that this research may open new avenues for treating chronic breathing disorders — such as asthma, emphysema and bronchitis — that constrict and obstruct the airways. No one had previously suspected that olfactory receptors would be present in airways past the nasal cavity. But working with human smooth muscle cells isolated and grown from the healthy parts of airway tissue surrounding excised tumors, Benjamin Kalbe and his colleagues applied a large number of odor molecules and watched two of them activate the muscle cells. Because it is well established which odors activate which receptors, Kalbe and team were able to probe tissue biopsies look for two specific receptors – OR1D2 and OR2AG1, finding found both of […]
