Matsunami Lab
Principal Investigator: Hiroaki Matsunami
Institution: Duke University (Durham, NC)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary A fundamental goal of sensory neuroscience is to understand how external signals from the environment are detected and translated into neural signals that underlie perception and enable discrimination of different stimuli. In the mammalian olfactory system, odorant detection and discrimination are mediated by hundreds of distinct odorant receptors (ORs) tuned to detect small, volatile molecules with diverse physicochemical properties. To understand the neural basis of olfactory sensation it is necessary to determine the nature of OR sensitivity and selectivity across olfactory chemical space, as well as how OR – odorant interactions drive neural activity. The proposed project addresses these goals by investigating OR selectivity and function at multiple levels for three ORs in the mouse olfactory system. The project builds on a well-established collaborative pipeline between the two co-Investigators that allows for predictions arising from structure-function studies and in vitro assays to be tested in vivo for the same ORs. The project is organized around two major Aims. Aim 1 will investigate the structural determinants of OR activation and corresponding neural sig…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01DC022770-02: Mechanisms of Odor Detection and Discrimination (2026)
- 5R01DC020353-05: Enhancing olfactory receptor expression for biochemical studies of odorant-receptor interactions (2026)
- 5R01DC020353-04: Enhancing olfactory receptor expression for biochemical studies of odorant-receptor interactions (2025)
- 1R01DC022770-01: Mechanisms of Odor Detection and Discrimination (2025)
- 5R01DC020353-03: Enhancing olfactory receptor expression for biochemical studies of odorant-receptor interactions (2024)
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