A bitter taste has always been considered a warning signal, devoted to protecting us from ingesting potentially harmful ...

Viruses attack nearly every living organism on Earth. To do so, they rely on highly specialized proteins that recognize and ...

Breaking a longstanding impasse in our understanding of olfaction, scientists at UC San Francisco have created the first molecular-level, 3D picture of how an odor molecule activates a human odorant ...

Our sense of smell seems to be the most complicated, and as such it’s the least understood. To help shed some light on the system, researchers at Rockefeller University have taken the first ...

Many people are familiar with histamine, a biological molecule that serves as a key driver of allergic reactions and other immune responses. However, histamine is also a major neurotransmitter in the ...

In a bid to understand why mosquitoes may be more attracted to one human than another, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they have mapped specialized receptors on the insects' nerve cells that ...