Sentences with phrase «odorant molecules»

Background: Olfactory receptors (ORs) recognize odorant molecules and activate a signal transduction pathway that ultimately leads to the perception of smell.

For example, based on the perception of the hundreds of odorant molecules found in coffee, the piriform cortex would be able to recognize a single odor, that of coffee.

Before it tunnels, the electron distorts the odorant molecule's electrical field.

Not exact matches

Turin says the strongest tests of his theory so far come from studies in which researchers replace an odorant atom with an isotope of that atom, which has a slightly different weight and changes the molecule's frequency of vibration.

Turin's more controversial theory, put forth in 1996 and now the subject of two popular books, holds instead that odorant receptors sense the way a molecule's atoms jiggle.

Zwiebel and colleagues scanned the mosquito genome looking for genes similar to those that generate fruit fly odorant receptors, proteins that project from nerve cells and initiate a biochemical cascade when they encounter certain molecules in the air.

The odorant receptor molecules sit on the surface of sensory nerve cells in our nose.

Most scents are composed of many odorants; a whiff of chocolate, for example, is made up of hundreds of different odor molecules.

Then, as now, the prevailing notion was that the sensation of different smells is triggered when molecules called odorants fit into receptors in our nostrils like three - dimensional puzzle pieces snapping into place.

C. elegans has the ability to distinguish between hundreds of different odors due to a range of molecules — odorant receptors — on the surface of a cluster of neurons at the tip of its head.

In principle, odorant isotopomers provide a possible test of shape vs. vibration mechanisms: replacing, for example, hydrogen with deuterium in an odorant leaves the ground - state conformation of the molecule unaltered while doubling atomic mass and so altering the frequency of all its vibrational modes to a greater or lesser extent [11].