School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Professor Peter Mombaerts, Director, Max Planck Research Unit for Neurogenetics
Talk Title: Targeting olfaction

Date: 14 November 2025 (Friday)
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: Mrs Chen Yang Foo Oi Telemedicine Centre, 2/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Mu He

Biography

Peter Mombaerts was born on 27 September 1962 in Leuven, Belgium. He obtained his M.D. degree in June 1987 at the Catholic University of Leuven with summa cum laude and congratulations of the examining board. He then left Belgium for the US to join the Ph.D. programme of the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. His Ph.D. advisor was Dr. Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1987). He obtained his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1992 with a thesis on immunodeficient mice generated by gene targeting. From 1993 to 1995, he was a postdoc with Dr. Richard Axel (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2004) at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, and developed a genetic approach to visualize axonal projections of mouse olfactory sensory neurons that express the same odorant receptor gene. From 1995 to 2007, he was a faculty member at The Rockefeller University in New York, NY, USA: Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. In 2008, he moved to Frankfurt, Germany as director of the newly created Department of Molecular Neurogenetics at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics. In 2013, he became the director of the independent Max Planck Research Unit of Neurogenetics, also in Frankfurt, Germany. He has authored 140 papers, which have been cited 21,424 times, and his h-index is 70. His main research interest is the development and function of the olfactory system, in mice and in humans. In recent years, he has also been investigating the pathobiological events that lead to olfactory dysfunction in COVID-19.

Abstract

In the mouse, the sense of smell (olfaction) is mediated by >1200 odorant receptors, the largest gene family in the genome. These receptors are G-protein coupled. Every olfactory sensory neuron in the main olfactory epithelium is thought to express only one odorant receptor gene, from one allele. Axons of neurons that express the same receptor coalesce into the same structures in the olfactory bulb, termed glomeruli, where they form synapses with second-order neurons in the olfactory pathway. It is now well established that odorant receptors are intimately involved in axonal coalescence, but the mechanisms remain obscure. Our main interests are odorant receptor gene choice, axonal wiring, and olfactory coding. Our research is done in the laboratory mouse.

ALL ARE WELCOME.