Scientists Create the First Detailed 'Smell Map' of Odor Sensors in the Mouse Nose—and Sniff Out Some Surprises

A hidden map in your nose could explain how smell works

Scientists have finally cracked one of the biggest mysteries in the senses: how smell is organized. By mapping millions of neurons in mice, researchers discovered that smell receptors in the nose aren’t random at all—they’re arranged in neat, overlapping stripes based on receptor type, forming a hidden structure scientists never knew existed. Even more striking, this layout mirrors how smell information is mapped in the brain, revealing a coordi…

Scientists Create the First Detailed 'Smell Map' of Odor Sensors in the Mouse Nose—and Sniff Out Some Surprises

In two new studies, researchers used genetic techniques to upend a long-standing assumption that the nerve cells with scent detectors were randomly arranged. They don’t know whether the same spatial organization is found in human noses

First-Ever “Smell Map” Illustrates Just How Little We Knew About Our Noses

It has been said that human beings can distinguish and mentally catalog more than 10,000 distinct scents, and yet despite the acuity of our noses, smell itself remains our least understood and least well-explained human sense. We have long known that the walls of our nasal cavity–aka, our noses–are lined with millions of tiny olfactory receptors, nerves that emit signals to our brain. The “olfactory bulb” deep in our brain makes sense of these s…

First detailed ‘smell maps’ reveal how noses track odours

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the…

First-of-its-kind map of the mouse nose reveals surprises about the sense of smell

A new map shows how smell receptors in the mouse nose are precisely organized into tight bands based on type.

Harvard scientists create first detailed map of smell receptors

For most of us, the sense of smell is an integral part of everyday life; it plays a critical role in providing information about our surroundings, alerting us to potential dangers, enhancing our sense of taste, and evoking emotions and memories.