The internal nose

Saturday mornings bring the Not Exactly Rocket Science linkfest.  Some good ones today.  A kidney researcher complained to her advisor about some bad data she was getting from a kidney gene experiment.  It almost seemed as if there were scent receptors in the kidney.

He kind of looked at me for a second, and he was like "Scent receptors in the kidney.  That would be cool though, right?"  At that point we both still thought it was one of those crazy, stupid ideas you laugh about later.

It turns out that we have scent/taste receptors all over our bodies, in the kidney, in the bronchial tubes, in the sinuses, and in fact anywhere it would be helpful to switch a process off or on upon the detection of a particular molecule. It's possible that scent receptors started in our ancestors' internal organs and migrated to the external sensory organs fairly late in the evolutionary process.

A breakdown in one kind of scent receptor may explain why some people have recurrent sinus infections that don't respond to the usual surgical fix.