These psychedelic swirls resemble a brain, but in fact, they were taken just in front of a brain—in a mouse’s nose to be exact. This is the nasal epithelium, which lies about half a centimeter behind the tip of a mouse’s nose. The cells lining the epithelium’s many folds essentially translate odiferous molecules that the mouse inhales into signals that go to the brain.
David Brann, a postdoctoral research fellow in Sandeep R. Datta’s lab at Harvard University, and coworkers there captured this image with a fluorescence microscope after they genetically modified the mouse to express fluorescent green neurons and stained the other cells in the sample blue. Red represents cells that are dying.
By inspecting all the little green pockets, the team realized that mice’s 1,000 different kinds of smell receptors are precisely organized in a sort of map rather than randomly strewn around the nose. Understanding that organization can help us understand how people lose or damage their sense of smell and how we might be able to fix it, Brann says.
Credit: David Brann/Datta Lab. You can follow Brann on Instagram @davidhbrann.
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