Smell plays a vital role in daily life. It helps us detect danger, enriches the way food tastes, and is closely tied to memory and emotion. Even so, scientists have long struggled to fully explain how this sense works at a basic biological level.

“Olfaction is super-mysterious,” said Sandeep (Robert) Datta, professor of neurobiology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. Compared with sight, hearing, and touch, the science behind smell has remained less developed.

First Detailed Map of Smell Receptors in the Nose
Using mice, Datta and his team have now produced the first detailed map showing how more than a thousand different smell receptors are arranged inside the nose.

Their findings overturn a long-standing assumption. Instead of being randomly distributed, the neurons that carry these receptors are arranged in a highly organized way. They form horizontal stripes that extend from the top of the nose to the bottom, grouped by receptor type.

“Our results bring order to a system that was previously thought to lack order, which changes conceptually how we think this works,” said Datta, senior author of the study.

The team also found that this layout in the nose aligns with corresponding maps in the olfactory bulb of the brain. This connection offers new clues about how scent signals travel from the nose into the brain.