Targeting the complexity of mouse olfactory system

In recent years the research on the olfactory system has entered a phase of deep innovation, regardless of the animal model taken as a reference. While the advancements achieved in different fields have provided answer to old questions, the striking evidences that have emerged in this new olfactory landscape have brought new ideas, new hypothesis and new scientific problems that necessarily need to be approached with adequate tools and strategies. The work presented in this thesis has targeted three different issues among the more intriguing ones concerning the murine olfactory system. The project described in the first section has conf ronted with the molecular identity of the Calcium-activated chloride channel responsible for the amplification of cationic currents in olfactory sensory neurons, a key mechanism for the triggering of action potentials after binding of odour molecules with their specific receptors. Olfactory microvillar cells constitute a cell population largely represented in the main olfactory epithelium, but their role is still poorly understood mostly because a precise genomic characterization of this cell-type has never been undertaken; the project presented in the second section has tried to reveal the genomic fingerprint of microvillar cells through a custom gene expression profiling. The data presented in the third section of this thesis are the result of a deep genomic investigation that has targeted the entire transcriptome of the olfactory sensory epithelium exploiting a newly developed high-throughput tagging approach derived from the Cap-Analysis of Gene Expression (CAGE) technology. The potential of this workflow has allowed revealing new details about the expression of pheromone vomeronasal receptors in the main olfactory epithelium.