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����156 Thomas Laudes
New data for the Database of Odorant responses - DoOR
Authors: Thomas Laudes 1 , Daniel Münch 1 , Jennifer Ignatious Raja 1 , C. Giovanni
Galizia 1
Affiliation: 1 University of Konstanz
In the olfactory world, organisms have to deal with thousands of different odorants
and have evolved sophisticated chemical olfactory systems to perform this task.
These systems differentiate meaningful stimuli from background thereby enabling a
given animal to locate and navigate even in a turbulent surrounding to a food source
or find mating partners. The coding of thousands of different odorants with a
relatively low number of input channels is achieved by an ensemble response that
arises due to activation of an individual set of olfactory sensory neurons (OSN) by a
particular odorant. Each OSN is expressing a given olfactory receptor (OR) which
defines its sensitivity to a set of odorants. In order to decipher the olfactory code one
would ideally want to know all of these response profiles, the so called olfactome. Of
all olfactory systems, that of Drosophila melanogaster is the one in which most
receptor ? ligand combinations are already measured. But there are still some OSNs
which were only tested with a few ligands so far or are not even characterized yet.
Here we present response profiles of the four Drosophila Ors Or10a, Or42b, Or56a
and Or 69a. We measured calcium concentration changes directly in the antenna of
genetically modified flies which expressed the calcium sensor G-CaMP exclusively in
Or10a, Or42b, Or56a and Or69a carrying neurons. Among the best ligands for Or69a
we found 4-Methylphenol, a-Terpineole, ß-Citronellol and Ethyl-3-hydroxyhexanoate.
For Or56a we found both, strong excitatory and inhibitory responses. (1R)-(?)-
Fenchone and ?-Ionone, being the two best excitatory ligands and 2,3-butanedione
and ethanoic acid leading to strong inhibitory responses. The response profile of
Or42b revealed 3-Octanol, Linalool and 2-Heptanol as inhibitory stimuli and 3-
Hexanone, Ethyl-3-hydroxybutanoate and 3-Pentene-2-one as excitatory ligands. For
Or10a we found Methyl tiglate and Ethyl tiglate as strong excitatory ligands, 2-
Propylphenol and Isoeugenol elicit inhibitory responses.
This new data will be included into DoOR, the Database of Odorant Responses, an
open access database (http://neuro.uni.kn/DoOR). DoOR is able to integrate
heterogeneous data-sets from different labs and no matter what technique was used
for measuring them (e.g. action potentials, calcium influx or in situ measurements vs.
heterologous expression), thereby getting one step closer to the complete olfactome.
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