Phosphoinositide Signaling in Mammalian Olfaction

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Odors play an increasingly appreciated role in our general quality of life and well being, a role that is compromised by the effect of disease, drugs, aging and environmental onslaught on the olfactory epithelium. Primary receptor neurons in the olfactory epithelium serve the critical function of detecting and transducing odor stimuli. Disruption of any of the cellular processes leading to receptor cell activation would impair olfactory function. New findings on which this project is built underscore earlier, inconclusive evidence that the process by which odorants activate mammalian olfactory receptor cells may be more complex than originally appreciated. These findings show that blocking the phosphoinositide-3 kinase (PI3K)-mediated arm of the phosphoinositide signaling pathway enhances odorant-evoked increases in intracellular calcium in rat olfactory receptor cells in an odorant-specific manner, and suggest that phosphoinosotide signaling modulates odorant-evoked excitation of mammalian olfactory receptor cells in the context of odorant coding. The presence of a second intracellular signaling pathway activated in an odorant-specific manner would allow the receptor cell to actually integrate the signal that establishes the combinatorial code on which odor recognition is based. A series of focused, primarily electrophysiological and imaging-based experiments address this novel idea by further characterizing the effect of blocking PI3K on the response of rat and mouse olfactory receptor neurons, by beginning to characterize the cellular mechanisms by which PI3K modulates the output of the cells, and by further characterizing the functional significance of this modulation. The results of the project can be expected to clarify the long-suspected, but elusive role of phosphoinositide signaling in mammalian olfaction, and provide a more complete understanding of the role of the olfactory periphery in how odorants are encoded by the nervous system.