Individual Differences in Olfaction

描述（由申请人提供）：嗅觉在与生活质量相关的问题上起着重要作用（例如，对食物和饮料的欣赏，精美的香水，花园和其他野生动物，也许还有其他人的气味）。气味还可以警告危险（例如，天然气中的警告剂气味，变质食品的气味，或者在工作场所，表明可能需要注意的过程或环境）。个体必须有一个功能齐全的嗅觉系统——气味的主要受体，由编码特定蛋白质的基因构成，是人类体验气味环境的过滤器。如果这些过滤器提供的信息因人而异，那么现实对每个人来说都是不一样的。先前的研究表明，人们对气味的感知确实不同：有些人无法闻到单一化合物的气味。这被称为特异性嗅觉缺失症，可以被测量为当气味存在时感知缺失，或者作为对气味敏感性的转变，以至于人对它的敏感性大大降低，或者它的感知强度减弱。在其他情况下，一种气味可能会被闻到，但其影响可能因人而异（例如，香菜的气味对一些人来说非常令人愉快，而另一些人则觉得这种气味很难闻）。目前，生物医学界还没有完全理解嗅觉是如何工作的；然而，了解人与人之间差异的生物学基础可以为实现这一目标提供重大进展。在这个项目中，我们将研究大约1600名非裔美国人、亚洲人、高加索人和西班牙人的嗅觉感知，他们也将捐赠他们的DMA样本。目标是将对气味的敏感性和反应的变化与已知的基因的潜在变化联系起来，这些基因被认为是负责构建鼻子嗅觉受体细胞上表达的初始过滤器（蛋白质）的基因。为了做到这一点，我们将评估个人对气味的行为反应，并描述在人的基因组中发现的嗅觉受体的基因。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The sense of smell plays an important role in issues related to quality of life (e.g., appreciation of food and drink, fine fragrances, gardens and other wildlife, and perhaps the odor of other people). Smells also warn of danger (e.g., the odor of warning agents in natural gas, that of spoiled foods, or, in the workplace, signs that a process or environment might require attention). To appeciate odors individuals must have a fully functional olfactory system - the primary receptors for odorants, which are constructed from genes that encode specific proteins, are the filters through which humans experience the reality of their odor environment. If these filters provide information that differs across individuals, then reality is not the same for everyone. Previous research has shown that people do differ in their perception of odors: Some people cannot smell the odors of single compounds. This is termed specific anosmia and can be measured as an absence in perception when an odorant is present or as a shift in sensitivity to the odorant such that the person is much less sensitive to it or its perceived intensity is diminished. In other situations an odor may be smelted, but its impact may be different across individuals (e.g., the odor of the herb cilanro is quite pleasant for some people while others find the smell offensive). At present, the biomedical community does not fully understand how the sense of smell works; however, understanding the biological bases of differences across people can provide a significant advance to this end. In this project, we will study olfactory perception in approximately 1,600 African Americans, Asians, Caucasians and Hispanics who also will donate samples of their DMA. The goal is to correlate variation in sensitivity and responses to odors with known underlying variation in genes that are thought to be responsible for building the initial filters (proteins) that are expressed on the olfactory receptor cells in the nose. To do this, we will assess individual behavioral responses to odors and characterize the genes for olfactory receptors that are found within the person's genome.