An odorant-suppressible chloride conductance mediates inhibitory receptor potentials in lobster olfactory receptor neurons

Understanding the cellular events that mediate olfactory transduction has been a major focus of olfactory research. This course of discovery revealed that all animals do not necessarily use the same mechanisms to transduce odorant information. However, general principles of olfactory organization apparently exist that transcend this mechanistic diversity. These organizational principles presumably reflect the response of animals to the common challenge inherent in detecting odorant stimuli. Knowing how mechanistic diversity is encompassed in a set of common organizational principles should ultimately facilitate our understanding of how animals detect and discriminate odorant information.; This body of work characterizes an odorant-suppressible Cl- conductance in lobster olfactory receptor neurons. The conductance, which has a novel pharmacology and is cyclic nucleotide dependent, serves to negatively regulate, or inhibit, the output of the receptor cell. The lack of odorant specificity associated with this conductance suggests that it plays a more general role in olfactory coding, and doesn't mediate the input of a particular subset of inhibitory odorants. In a more general context, this conductance is the first example of an odorant-suppressible Cl- conductance mediated by cyclic nucleotide signaling.