Slashdot Mirror
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."
That really stinks.
(It's a JOKE, not flamebait.)
Kudos to Drs. Axel and Buck.
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.
Woo hoo! That makes 4 Nobel laureates for Stuyvesant HS! Axel is class of '63
The Public Patent Foundation (which recently got Microsoft's FAT filesystem patent rejected) has gotten the patent office to agree to re-examine the most recent, presumably illegitimate Axel patents.
Of course this work has almost nothing to do with the work for which he was awarded the Nobel prize...
Olfaction is of central importance for most species
All living organisms can detect and identify chemical substances in their environment. It is obviously of great survival value to be able to identify suitable food and to avoid putrid or unfit foodstuff. Whereas fish has a relatively small number of odorant receptors, about one hundred, mice - the species Axel and Buck studied - have about one thousand. Humans have a somewhat smaller number than mice; some of the genes have been lost during evolution.
Smell is absolutely essential for a newborn mammalian pup to find the teats of its mother and obtain milk - without olfaction the pup does not survive unaided. Olfaction is also of paramount importance for many adult animals, since they observe and interpret their environment largely by sensing smell. For example, the area of the olfactory epithelium in dogs is some forty times larger than in humans.
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.
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
One thing to note is Nobel prizes in medicine are often awarded well after the original discovery. Second off, goto take a neurophysiology class and you will find out that since their paper, smell is one of the most completely understood systems of how it works. Its also often used as examples in showing how feedback, feedforward, and lateral inhibition work. Its really an important work in being able to understand how neurons interact and work better from the first neurons that get the signal to those that store the info in the brain.