Vive La Différence: An Interview with Catherine Dulac

One of the joyful aspects of a life in science is listening to the rare seminar that simply knocks your socks off. Two such memorable moments for me came in the form of job seminars by a pair of Richard Axel's post-docs: first, Linda Buck, who described olfactory receptors and later shared the Nobel Prize with Axel for this work, and then, Catherine Dulac, who identified pheromone receptors in the vomeronasal organ (VNO) in mice. These two sensory systems elicit very different responses: while the main olfactory system senses hundreds of thousands of different odorants, by binding volatile compounds to olfactory receptors within the main olfactory epithelium (MOE) and projecting them onto the olfactory cortex, the VNO detects a limited repertoire of species-specific pheromones that trigger sex-specific behaviors without any cortical output whatsoever.