Speaker
Description
A large diversity of odorant molecules reaches the antennae of insects at any given time. The key role of odorant receptors (ORs) is to translate the chemical complexity of the environment into interpretable neuronal signals. To this goal, ORs exhibit a wide range of ligand specificities: many ORs are promiscuous, responding to dozens of chemically diverse odorants, and some ORs are exquisitely selective towards just one chemical cue. In this talk, I will present our work towards understanding how ORs achieve diverse chemical specificity. Using cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM), electrophysiology and comparative studies, we characterized ORs from various insect species, shedding light on the diverse structural strategies by which odorant receptors achieve both promiscuous and selective odorant specificity.
