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Our sense of smell has a reputation for being underdeveloped — but this is ill-founded. The events of the past two years, in which millions of people lost their sense of smell to COVID-19, have put the spotlight on research emerging from the world of olfaction.
With millions of people losing their ability to detect aromas as a result of COVID-19, our most underappreciated sense is drawing researchers’ attention.
The loss of the sense of smell has been a hallmark symptom of COVID-19. The mechanisms behind SARS-CoV-2’s ability to interfere with this sense — as well as why variants such as Omicron do so less frequently — are becoming clearer.
Treatments for olfactory loss are currently scarce, but with millions of people unable to smell as a result of COVID-19, researchers are pursuing the problem with renewed vigour.
The hundreds of receptors that give us our sense of smell have been found to have important roles in other parts of the body, and the prospect of targeting them with drugs is growing.
Olfaction could influence how people respond to threats or select a partner. To investigate, researchers need to design experiments that can capture its effects.
Computational neuroscientist Guangyu Robert Yang lifts the lid on the use of machine learning to detect and process odours, and the wider implications for neuroscience.
Olfaction has profoundly shaped human experience and behaviour from the deep past through to the present day. Advanced biomolecular and ‘omics’ sciences enable more direct insights into past scents, offering new options to explore critical aspects of ancient society and lifeways as well as the historical meanings of smell.
Hag-Ali and colleagues highlight the potential for using trained dogs for detecting COVID-19 positive patients. The dogs, originally trained for explosives detection, were able to detect COVID-19 positive sweat samples with a sensitivity rivaling the gold-standard RT-PCR test currently used.
Studies using neural ensemble recordings in rats show that cells in the piriform cortex carry a spatial representation of the environment and link locations to olfactory sensory inputs.
Olfactory and taste receptors are ectopically expressed in multiple extra-nasal and extra-oral tissues, exhibiting potential functions in a diverse range of biological processes. Here, Lee et al. discuss the physiological roles of these ectopic olfactory and taste receptors, assessing their emerging therapeutic and diagnostic potential in conditions including asthma, wound healing, obesity and cancer.
Integrating knowledge about the circuit-level organization of the brain into neuromorphic artificial systems is a challenging research problem. The authors present a neural algorithm for the learning of odourant signals and their robust identification under noise, based on the architecture of the mammalian olfactory bulb and implemented on the Intel Loihi neuromorphic system.
Multi-ancestry genome-wide analyses identify variants near UGT2A1 and UGT2A2 associated with COVID-19-related loss of smell or taste. Both genes are expressed in the olfactory epithelium and play a role in metabolizing odorants.