Sophisticated Smells

Experienced chefs can smell subtle herb fusions – their senses honed over years. A new study suggests this expert nose may be the result of additional neurons that develop in response to exposure to specific smells. The olfactory epithelium, tissue lining the nasal cavity, produces new odour-sensing neurons in a process long-assumed to be a natural renewal, replacing old for new and generating random subtypes of neurons tailored to different odours. But recent evidence suggested some subtypes were more likely to develop than others in certain situations, so researchers blocked one nostril of mice and exposed them to male scent. They found that this exposure selectively boosted the growth of neurons that sense those odours (pictured, with proliferating neurons pink in a section of mouse olfactory epithelium). Understanding this sensory training might provide new routes to treatments for people who have lost their sense of smell.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Kawsar Hossain and colleagues
• Department of Pediatrics, Section of Developmental Biology, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, June 2025