MONELL CHEMICAL SENSES CENTER

The Monell Center has 4 strategic aims:

1. Improve Nutritional Health
2. Diagnose and Treat Diseases
3. Attach the Loss of Smell and Taste
4. Digitize Smells and Tastes

To unravel these complex interwoven processes, the Center is structured to encourage collaboration among scientists from diverse backgrounds. The Monell Center has no departmental organization; offices and laboratories are not segregated by discipline; and most importantly, the staff is imbued with the ideal of multidisciplinary interaction.

Among the Center's unique areas of expertise:

• Human sensory testing across the lifespan using innovative psychophysical and physiological techniques
• Integration of human sensory perception with molecular biology
• Pioneering techniques to biopsy and maintain living human taste and smell receptor cells for human species-specific study
• Experiential, physiological and genetic determinants of flavor and food preferences across the lifespan
• Stem cell biology to regenerate dysfunctional taste and smell receptor cells
• Focus on taste and smell receptors in extra-oral sites and their relation to health
• Odor communication in health and disease

The Center's research advances fundamental knowledge of taste and smell. In the process, Monell's scientific findings also uncover solutions to pressing problems related to health, the environment and more. Monell scientists helped to identify the sweet taste receptor, a breakthrough that paved the way to current inquiries into how to stimulate, manipulate, enhance, inhibit, and create synergy of sweet taste. In other areas, ongoing Monell research is:

• Demonstrating the key role of prenatal and early postnatal experience in shaping life-long taste, odor, and flavor preferences.
• Utilizing advanced stem cell biology techniques to regenerate smell receptors and develop treatments for smell loss.
• Analyzing the genetics of taste to identify the salt taste receptor, knowledge needed to develop effective salt enhancers and modifiers and help reduce sodium consumption.
• Identifying how body odors can be used for the early non-invasive detection and diagnosis of cancer, infectious disease, and tissue damage.
• Determining how genetic variation in taste and smell receptors influences flavor perception, food choice, nutrition, and health across the lifespan.
• Pioneering studies of odortypes, genetically-determined olfactory markers of individual identity.
• Revealing how short and long-term exposure to air-borne chemicals alter sensory perception and health.
• Probing the mechanism and function of taste and smell receptors located outside the mouth and nose.