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

Exactly, exactly.

Exactly.

We lacked the technical ability to understand the precise pattern of expression for each one of these thousand or so receptors in the mouse.

And because we didn't have that tool and because the anatomy was so complicated and people really didn't know what to make of what they were seeing when they asked where individual olfactory receptor genes are expressed in the nose.

And that led them to hypothesize that maybe for the most part,

neurons are randomly picking which receptor to express.

Right, exactly, exactly.

So what we found was through the use of sort of more modern techniques that let us look at many hundreds of genes at once,

is that actually there's a really precise pattern to the ways in which receptors are expressed in the nose, where the thousand receptors are actually organized into essentially a thousand stripes running from the top to the bottom of your nose.

These stripes are overlapping, but their position is really, really precise.

And it seems to be essentially invariant from one mouse to the next.

So instead of each mouse having a kind of a different nose where neurons are just randomly picking what receptors to express, instead, it seems like

Like the nervous system is capable of building this incredibly precise machine for detecting smells.

Yeah.

So to be honest, I think a lot of the reason people assumed that receptors would be chosen randomly is because no one believed that the nervous system could solve the problem of placing 1,000 things into a precise order.

Yeah.

So now that we have this map, I think the main question we want to ask is, what does this map mean?

You know, why are these thousand receptors in your nose in the order from top to bottom that they're actually in?

And the short answer is we don't know, but having this map allows us to ask questions about how things are organized.

But I can tell you some possibilities.

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