Sniffer Mouse

Scientists have honed mice’s sense of smell to detect chosen odours.

17:26 12 July 2016

Researchers at Hunter College, the City University of New York, have honed the rodents’ sense of smell to detect chosen odours, raising hopes of using them in the future to detect land mines, as well as potentially life-threatening diseases.

 

The noses of mammals contain a collection of sensory neurons, each equipped with a single chemical sensor called a receptor that detects a specific smell. To understand the mechanism used by neurons in choosing a specific receptor, Dr Paul Feinstein, an associate professor of biological sciences at Hunter, tinkered with the mouse genome. He found a string that worked when copied four or more times. It was extra copies of this extra string of DNA that resulted in a series of super-sniffer mice.

 

The rodents’ amplified smell was then put to the test by using fluorescent imaging to trace the activation of the amplified odour receptor in response to the receptor’s corresponding odour.

 

‘The animals could smell the odour better because of the increased presence of the receptor,’ Dr D'Hulst said.

 

Dr Fernstein said: ‘We have these millions-of-years-old receptors that are highly tuned to detect chemicals.

 

‘We think we can develop them into tools and use them to detect disease.’