| Budget Amount *help |
¥17,290,000 (Direct Cost: ¥13,300,000、Indirect Cost: ¥3,990,000)
Fiscal Year 2022: ¥3,510,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,700,000、Indirect Cost: ¥810,000)
Fiscal Year 2021: ¥3,640,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,800,000、Indirect Cost: ¥840,000)
Fiscal Year 2020: ¥4,550,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,500,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,050,000)
Fiscal Year 2019: ¥5,590,000 (Direct Cost: ¥4,300,000、Indirect Cost: ¥1,290,000)
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
Individual olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) express a single odorant receptor (OR) gene from the class I or class II repertoires in mice. The mechanisms that regulate OR class choice in OSNs remain unknown. We show that the transcription factor Bcl11b determines the OR class to be expressed in OSNs. Both loss- and gain-of-function analyses demonstrate that class I is a default fate of OSNs and that Bcl11b dictates a class II OR choice by suppressing the effect of the J-element, a class I-OR enhancer. We further demonstrate that OSN-specific genetic manipulations of Bcl11b bias the OR class choice, generating mice with "class I-dominant" and "class II-dominant" noses, which display contrasting innate olfactory behaviors to two distinct aversive odorants. Overall, these findings reveal a unique transcriptional mechanism mediating a binary switch for OR class choice that is crucial to both the anatomical and functional organization of the olfactory system.
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