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Medicine/Physiology Nobel Laureates Announced
Seehund writes "Today, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced the laureates of this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck are jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for their discoveries in the field of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system."
Here comes some science: it was accepted/assumed that all these receptors were transmembrane g-protein coupled receptors. Without getting into that, they all span the cell membrane with 7 hydrophobic transmembrane domains. These are all well conserved among the receptors, and a couple of them are VERY conserved. They designed a whole bunch of PCR primers based on these regions of similarity and mixed pairs of them together to see what happened.
One pair light up a genome PCR like mad. It was very very clear that a whole gene family existed that shared homology to the very few known odorant receptors.
So while it is true that you might not think that smell is a huge deal (the mechanics are rather mind-boggling, and scienctists don't like not understanding things), they have paved the way for that as well as provided a hugely referenced technique for scanning genomes for multi-gene families. That in itself is worthy of at least a nomination.
Kidding aside, this is interesting and worthy of praise. Olfaction is deeply intertwined with memory and an important part of general living. They have mapped genes involved in the process and identified a seemingly tree-like messaging hierarchy where messages can meet and interact to produce unique smells/thoughts/ideas in differnt parts of the brain.
Actually, while other animals have more, humans only have about 350 different receptors. The key to our ability to smell so many distinct scents is that each odorant will activate more then one kind of recpetor. Thus, olfaction is not, "oh, this receptor lit up, so it's this smell," but rather, "these receptors lit up, and combined they produce this smell."
Work that Linda's group, in conjunction with our group and a number of others, has brought us closer to understanding how odor works on a molecular level, to how odor is perceived, to how we can model this using artificial equipment.
Ultimately, she is well deserving of the Prize.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
So can the ear. And a guitar string. And a grass field in the wind. Actually, it was the other way round. Mathematicians (well, Jean Baptiste Fourier, one French mathematician) invented the Fourier analysis in order to understand how complex signals can be separated into different frequencies by simple natural systems.