ABSTRACT
In 2004, Linda Buck and Richard Axel shared the US$1.4 million Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organisation of the olfactory system". Axel and Buck are famous for their Nobel Prize winning work on olfaction that demonstrated the nasal cells containing receptors for the detection of smell are encoded by a large family of over 1000 different genes – with each gene specifying a receptor specialised only to detect a few odours. Buck's work, published in 1985, would show that an Aplysia neuron known as R15, which formed part of its abdominal ganglion, expressed a gene that contributed to producing several different types of neuropeptide. Axel, in addition to his contributions to neurobiology, has made seminal discoveries in immunology, with his laboratory using recombinant DNA technology in 2004 to discover the molecule CD4, which is a surface protein found on certain types of white blood cells involved in the transmission of HIV.
