Common principles of olfactory coding across olfactory receptor families and species

Beside vision and hearing, the chemoreception is one of the important senses for organisms in an aquatic environment. To detect food, predators or sexual partners a broad variation of different receptors in the nose of an animal is needed. Therefore, coding strategy of the olfactory receptors is the formation of spatial distribution patterns in order to maintain their continued function in the event of damage to the epithelium. This work focused on the visualization of individual receptors and receptor families of different aquatic animals in the olfactory epithelium and for this, among other things, expression and spatial distribution were investigated. Here it could be shown, that the recently discovered adenosine receptor A2c is expressed in the eel, carp and claw frog in a sparse and distributed pattern within their olfactory epithelium similar to the pattern observed for zebrafish. A sharp contrast is formed by the expression of A2c in lamprey, because of A2c-expressing cells forming a contiguous domain directly adjacent to the sensory region. In addition it was shown, that this expression is consistent, with the expression in neuronal progenitor cells. It could be that A2c switched the function during evolution in the lineage of vertebrates. Also for the first time, the expression pattern of three of six possible V1R receptors, and the absence of two possible V1R and two V2R receptors in adult Lampetra fluviatilis was demonstrated. It was shown that the three V1Rs form different expression zones, when looking at the height in the lamella. Here we also completed a project to investigate the spatial distribution of the complete V1R-related Oras receptor family in zebrafish. It was shown, that each of the ora genes had its own expression zone