PURPOSE To evaluate the sites of injury in patients with posttraumatic olfactory deficits and to compare damage with findings on clinical olfactory tests. METHODS Twenty-five patients with posttraumatic olfactory dysfunction were examined by means of olfactory testing, endoscopy, and MR imaging. MR surface-coil scans through the olfactory bulbs and tracts and head-coil scans of the temporal l...

Olfactory neuropiles across different phyla organize into glomerular structures where afferents from a single olfactory receptor class synapse with uniglomerular projecting interneurons. In adult Drosophila, olfactory projection interneurons, partially instructed by the larval olfactory system laid down during embryogenesis, pattern the developing antennal lobe prior to the ingrowth of afferent...

Topographic projections are important for coding sensory information in the visual, auditory, and somatosensory systems but are of uncertain importance in the coding of olfactory information. We searched for topographic projections between olfactory receptor cells and the olfactory bulb of the rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss. Anterograde axonal tracing with HRP revealed that the olfactory axo...

Stereotypical connections between olfactory sensory neuron axons and mitral cell dendrites in the olfactory bulb establish the first synaptic relay for olfactory perception. While mechanisms of olfactory sensory axon targeting are reported, molecular regulation of mitral cell dendritic growth and refinement are unclear. During embryonic development, mitral cell dendritic distribution overlaps w...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the consequences of olfactory loss and explore specific questions related to the effect of duration of olfactory loss, degree of olfactory sensitivity, and cause of the olfactory loss. PATIENTS A total of 278 consecutive patients with hyposmia or anosmia were examined. RESULTS Causes of olfactory loss were categorized as follows: trauma (17%), upper respiratory trac...

Spermatogenic immunoglobulin superfamily (SgIGSF) is a cell adhesion molecule originally discovered in mouse testis. SgIGSF is expressed not only in spermatogenic cells but also in lung and liver epithelial cells and in neurons and glia of the central and peripheral nervous systems. In the present study, we examined the expression and localization of SgIGSF in mouse olfactory epithelium before ...

The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is an ancient jawless fish phyletically removed from modern (teleost) fishes. It is an excellent organism in the study of olfaction due to its accessible olfactory pathway, which is susceptible to manipulation, and its important location in the evolution of vertebrates. There are many similarities in the olfactory systems of all fishes, and they also share c...

Olfactory perception is mediated by a large array of olfactory receptor genes. The human genome contains 851 olfactory receptor gene loci. More than 50% of the loci are annotated as nonfunctional due to frame-disrupting mutations. Furthermore haplotypic missense alleles can be nonfunctional resulting from substitution of key amino acids governing protein folding or interactions with signal tran...

This review describes recent molecular biological research on olfactory chemoreception in fishes. The recent rapid development of molecular biological techniques has provided new valuable information on the main and vomeronasal olfactory receptor (OR) genes, the axonal projection from ciliated, microvillous and crypt-olfactory receptor cells to the olfactory bulb, properties of odorant substanc...

BACKGROUND Subjective olfactory tests are easy to perform and popularly applied in the clinic, but using only these, it is difficult to diagnose all disorders of the olfactory system. The olfactory event related potentials technique offers further insight into the olfactory system and is an ideal objective test. This analysis was of subjective and objective data on the olfactory function of twe...