Sep 6, 2024
Your olfactory and gustatory systems in action.
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Your olfactory and gustatory systems in action.
Following Your Nose
Your nose can detect around a trillion smells, in part thanks to its olfactory sensory nerves. These nerves are also involved in clearing out waste that your brain produces, acting as a conduit for the drainage of waste-laden cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Using mice, researchers dig deeper into the anatomy of CSF removal, focusing on the bone that separates the nasal cavity from the brain, the cribriform plate (pictured, captured using micro-CT imaging). They injected a dye into the brain to track the drainage of CSF via olfactory sensory nerves passing through holes in the cribriform plate. Chemically destroying these nerves significantly reduced CSF drainage via the cribriform plate without increasing pressure inside the skull. This suggests a compensatory change in CSF production or flow. Damage to these nerves in humans, such as by air pollution, could therefore disrupt CSF turnover, which is known to occur in certain brain diseases.
Written by Lux Fatimathas
Image from work by Jordan N. Norwood and colleagues
Pennsylvania State University, PA, USA
Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
Published in eLife, May 2019
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Magic Memory Mushrooms
These bright green structures are mushroom bodies – tightly-packed collections of nerve cells in the brain of an adult fruit fly. First described more than 150 years ago, they play an important role in learning, particularly around smells, and are often used as a model for human memory-making. Nerve cells in mushroom bodies communicate in two different ways – either through releasing and receiving chemical signals, or by direct electrical connections – but it’s not clear exactly which processes are at work in the mushroom body as memories are made. To find out, researchers removed one of the genes that builds electrical connections between mushroom body cells (known as gap junctions), finding that these flies could no longer learn to associate a particular smell with a mild electrical shock. This shows that direct electrical communication is a key part of memory formation and retrieval in flies, and might be important in human brains too.
Written by Kat Arney
Image from work by Wei-Huan Shyu and colleagues
Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, College of Medicine, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan, Taiwan
Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
Published in PLOS Genetics, May 2019
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Organised Chaos
The brain’s nerve fibres can sometimes look a bit jumbled up, like a mesh of wires that badly needs tidying. In particular, the fibres that ultimately connect our nose to the part of the brain that interprets the smells we encounter (shown here as green, red-brown and white layers) have long been thought to be a bit disorganised. However, scientists have recently shown how this chaotic arrangement is actually what helps mice distinguish between similar odours. Rather than each ‘wire’ being responsible for a particular smell, the team found that they carry signals from many different smells. Mice can differentiate between odours because the pattern of signals carried in these nerves is distinctive for each smell, leaving a unique odour 'fingerprint' on this part of the brain. Perhaps there’s method in the madness of brain fibres after all, and that seemingly random connections may be more organised than we originally thought.
Written by Gaëlle Coullon
Image from work by Shyam Srinivasan and Charles F Stevens, The Salk Institute
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA
Image copyright held by the original authors
Research published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, July 2018
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