My recent research has had a little news coverage today which is lovely. My esteemed colleague, Dr. Matthew Cobb of the U of Manchester (@matthewcobb), fronted for our team today on BBC4 Inside Science (What Neandertals Smelt). The piece begins at 15:38 and runs for about 8 minutes.
The University of Manchester did a nice PR piece on our paper in Chemical Senses today as well. In short, we found a signature of natural selection acting on OR7D4, a gene that controls the receptor for androstenone. Androstenone is found in all mammals but male pigs have it in spades because it makes female pigs receptive to sex. Eurasians have a higher probability of desensitization to the compound based on their genetic code. We speculate a bit broadly that perhaps the decreased sensitivity to this compound made boar (which reeks of androstenone, among other things) more appealing as a food choice to our Neolithic ancestors. After all, pigs were first domesticated in Asia, where they have an evolutionary origin.
Perhaps the most fun part of this paper was the work done by my also esteemed colleague at Duke University (Dr. Hiroaki Matsunami) wherein his lab made the androstenone receptor based on sequence data from the Denisova paleogenome. My study of the ancient genes suggested that Altai Neandertal was similar to humans but Denisovans had a unique variant. This mutation did not make a real difference in the mutated gene’s functional response to the odor but the fact that we were able to demonstrate this was a big breakthrough.
Now, we are rebuilding about 30 more ancient olfactory receptors to see how different those were!
The Smell of Evolution 