Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on July 4, 2008
Chemical Senses 2008 33(7):597-598; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjn036
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Why Sniff?
Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Bristol BS8 1TD, Bristol, UK
Correspondence to be sent to: P.A. Brennan, Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TD, UK. e-mail: p.brennan@bristol.ac.uk
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The act of sniffing is so commonplace that most people rarely give a thought about what it is doing or why it is necessary. And yet, sniffing has long been recognized as a vital component of olfactory processing and perception. The first detailed studies on sniffing were published over 40 years ago (Welker 1964
), and a considerable amount of research since then has been devoted to characterizing sniffing behavior in a variety of species, in particular, in rats and humans (Kepecs et al. 2006; Mainland and Sobel 2006; Schoenfeld and Cleland 2006). However, there have been few studies on sniffing in mice, which is perhaps surprising considering the important role played by genetically manipulated mice in the elucidation of the molecular and neurophysiological mechanisms of olfaction. It is all the more surprising that this basic aspect of mouse behavior has not received more attention, given