Scientists sniff out the structure of a human olfactory receptor

Abstract

Our noses encounter a vast diversity of chemicals every day, but scientists know little of how odorants stir awake the receptors in our bodies. A recent study is the first to parse the structure of a human olfactory receptor, called OR51E2 ( Nature 2022, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05798-y ). The study’s authors reveal the full molecular picture of how OR51E2 interacts with propionate, the pungent player behind Swiss cheese. “It’s a landmark paper,” says Vanessa Ruta, a Rockefeller University sensory neuroscientist not involved in the study. Our bodies detect environmental stimuli with cellular sentinels called G-protein- coupled receptors (GPCRs). Of the 800 GPCRs encoded by the human genome, roughly half are tied to smell. Smell receptors are notoriously tricky to produce in sufficient quantities for structure studies. According to corresponding author and biochemist Aashish Manglik of the University of California, San Francisco, his team homed in on OR51E2 because it moonlights in