Nobel Prize Linda B. Buck - Part II

June 14, 2010

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Since she was first introduced to neuroscience, she says she had been fascinated by the brain's cellular and connectional diversity.

When she was close to end her project at Columbia University's &#&medical school&#&, she says she read a 1985 publication from Sol Snyder's group that discussed potential mechanisms underlying odor detection and she considers that reading as the determinant factor that changed her life. She recalls it was the first time she had ever thought about olfaction and she was fascinated.

She finally found a monumental puzzle to solve: How could humans and other mammals detect 10,000 or more odorous chemicals, and how could nearly identical chemicals generate different odor perceptions? This was what her scientist mind had been always looking for, an unparalleled diversity problem.

In 1988, she embarked on a search for odorant receptors, staying on in Richard's lab for this purpose.

In 1991, Richard Axel and Linda B. Buck published the identification of odorant receptors. In their landmark paper they cloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family of G protein-coupled receptors. By analyzing rat DNA, they estimated that there were approximately one thousand different genes for olfactory receptors in the mammalian genome. This research opened the door to the genetic and molecular analysis of the mechanisms of olfaction. In their later work, Buck and Axel have shown that each olfactory receptor neuron remarkably only expresses one kind of olfactory receptor protein and that the input from all neurons expressing the same receptor is collected by a single dedicated glomerulus of the olfactory bulb.

In 1991, she departed for Boston and became an assistant professor of neurobiology Department at Harvard &#&Medical School&#&, where she was immersed in an environment where she could broaden her understanding of the nervous system.

Her primary research interest is on how pheromones and odors are detected in the nose and interpreted in the brain. She says she received excellent support from her chairman, Gerry Fischbach, as she set up her lab.

She mentions with gratitude many excellent colleagues, including David Hubel, whose pioneering studies of the visual system with Torsten Wiesel, for which they received a Nobel Prize in 1981, had always been an inspiration to her.

In 1994, she became an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which has generously supported her work.