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Updated: Jul 4, 2025

Real-time In Vitro Monitoring of Odorant Receptor Activation by an Odorant in the Vapor Phase
Published on: April 23, 2019
The structure and function of olfactory receptors
Chenyang Wu1, Marc Xu1, Junlin Dong1
1The AlphaMol-SIAT Joint Laboratory, Shenzhen 518055, China; The Research Center for Computer-aided Drug Discovery, The Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Abstract:
Olfactory receptors (ORs) form the most important chemosensory receptor family responsible for our sense of smell in the nasal olfactory epithelium. This receptor family belongs to the class A G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Recent research has indicated that ORs are involved in many nonolfactory physiological processes in extranasal tissue, such as the brain, pancreas, and testes, and implies the possible role of their dysregulation in various diseases. The recently released structures of OR51E2 and consensus OR52 have also unveiled the uniqueness of ORs from other class A GPCR members. In this review, we discuss these recent developments and computational modeling efforts toward understanding the structural properties of unresolved ORs, which could guide potential future OR-targeted drug discovery.
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