Switch and Sniff

Take a good sniff of the air around you. What can you smell? Maybe some fresh coffee or baking cookies. Perhaps stale carpet, or someone who needs a good wash. Whatever it is, you can only smell it thanks to your olfactory epithelium – a thin sheet of cells in the back of your nose that captures smelly molecules in the air and converts them into information about the scents you encounter. This microscope image shows the developing brain of a mouse embryo, just over halfway through development. Cells that will become olfactory receptor neurons – nerve cells specialised for smelling – are highlighted in green around the little pocket in the top left of the picture. Scientists have found that a cluster of molecules known as SWI/SNF (pronounced ‘switch sniff’) are vital for the growth of nerve cells as the olfactory epithelium develops. So without SWI/SNF, you can’t sniff anything at all.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image from work by Christina Bachmann, Huong Nguyen and Joachim Rosenbusch, and colleagues
• University Medical Center, Georg-August-University, Goettingen, Germany
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Genetics, September 2016