Dr. Bob Datta

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91 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 1 May

Dr. Bob Datta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Science Friday · What cats and dogs hear + A 'smell map' of the nose · 1 May 2026 podcast

The neurons, for the most part, in your nose that detect smell, choose which receptor to express at random.

If you look inside a nose, it's organized into these structures called turbinates, which look kind of like curlicues or scrolls.

And so the anatomy on the inside of your nose is incredibly complicated if you just take a peek inside of it.

Exactly.

It has this really confusing and complicated topography.

And interestingly, animals that smell better often have even more complex topography.

So, you know, our noses are less complicated than a mouse nose.

It's less complicated than a dog's nose, which is like super complicated.

And the fact that the topography is so complicated means that it's really difficult for us as scientists to know what direction is up and down and what direction is left and right.

So that was one main limitation.

It's just unlike many of the other structures in our body, our nose has this really complicated and confusing shape.

The other limit was for many years, we were kind of limited technologically.

So there's an old technique that allows you to look at where a given gene is expressed in a tissue.

And that technique called in situ typically allows you to look at one or two genes at a time.

And so people would, say, pick one of the thousand receptors in the mouse and ask, where is this receptor expressed in the nose?

And as they did that multiple times, they couldn't really, looking one by one in this really complicated tissue, discern a pattern.

And that, yeah, that led them to think that it was random.

Yeah, absolutely.

So here they're doing in situ for receptor genes, trying to figure out where individual receptor genes are being expressed.

And of course, those genes encode the receptor itself.

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