Professor Matthew Cobb BA, Habilitation, PhD Michael Smith
Building|Oxford Road|Manchester|M13 9PT My laboratory studies
how the sense of smell works. To do this we use a rather unusual
animal - a maggot. You and I have about 4 million smell cells in
our noses. A maggot has just 21, and by using genetics we can
make a maggot with just a single smell cell in its nose. By
studying the behaviour of these animals, and the electrical
activity of their smell cells, we can understand how smells are
processed in the nose and in the brain. Not only does a maggot
have a brain, the bits of its brain that process smells are
wired up just like ours. So by studying something as simple as a
maggot we hope to understand how the sense of smell works in all
animals, including humans. - Lacaille F, Hiroi M, Twele R,
Inoshita T, Umemoto D, Maniere G, Marion-Poll F, Ozaki M,
Francke W, Cobb M, Everaerts C, Tanimura T, Ferveur JF. (2007).
An inhibitory sex pheromone tastes bitter for Drosophila males.
PLoS ONE, 2(7), e661. eSchola