Darwin's tree of life represents the path and estimates the time evolution took to get to the current diversity of life. Now, new findings suggest that this tree, an icon of evolution, may need to be redrawn. In research to be published in the April 13 advance online issue of Nature, researchers at Rockefeller University and the University of Tokyo have joined forces to reveal that insects have adopted a strategy to detect odors that is radically different from those of other organisms -- an unexpected and controversial finding that may dissolve a dominant ideology in the field.
Since 1991, researchers assumed that all vertebrates and invertebrates smell odors by using a complicated biological apparatus much like a Rube Goldberg device. For instance, someone pushing a doorbell would set off a series of elaborate, somewhat wacky, steps that culminate in the rather simple task of opening the door.
In the case of an insect's ability to smell, researchers believed that when molecules wafting in the air travel up the insect's nose, they latch onto a large protein (called a G-protein coupled odorant receptor) on the surface of the cell and set off a chain of similarly elaborate steps to open a molecular gate nearby, signaling the brain that an odor is present.
"It's that way in the nematode, it's that way in mammals, it's that way in every known vertebrate," says study co-author Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University. "So it's actually unreasonable to think that insects use a different strategy to detect odors. But here, we show that insects have gotten rid of all this stuff in the middle and activate the 'gate' directly."
The gate, a doughnut-shaped protein called an ion channel, provides a safe pathway for ions to flow into a cell. When molecules bind to the odor-sensitive ion channel, the protein changes its shape much like a gate or door changes its conformation as it is
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| Contact: Thania Benios tbenios@rockefeller.edu 212-327-7146 Rockefeller University Source:Eurekalert |
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