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TRP channels and opsins: universal mediators of sensory biology and behavior

Published on May 29, 2025   46 min

A selection of talks on Infectious Diseases

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My name is Craig Montell, and I'm a Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Major goals in sensory biology have been to define the sensory receptor cells and their intrinsic cell surface proteins that detect external stimuli.
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Many years ago, on a tour of the East Baltimore community school, I spotted a bulletin board outside of a kindergarten classroom reviewing the five classical senses. For these kindergarten students, and many of us, our education about sight, taste, smell, hearing, and touch were our earliest introduction to neuroscience. Understanding the mechanism that humans and other animals use to sense the world are among the most fundamental and fascinating questions in neuroscience. On the most basic level, even kindergarten students are curious about the senses. How is it possible that the visual system has a sensitivity to detect a dim star in the night sky, and not be blinded by brilliant images under the bright summer sky? These represent differences in light intensities of more than a billion fold. In humans, our auditory system is so exquisitely sensitive that we can detect minuscule sounds that cause vibrations in our eardrum of 0.3 nanometers or three angstroms. How the olfactory and gustatory systems detect enormous diversities of volatile and non-volatile chemicals and allow animals to discriminate between safe and dangerous stimuli. Touch is so sensitive that we can detect vibrations with displacements as little as 10 nanometers.

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TRP channels and opsins: universal mediators of sensory biology and behavior

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