Nobel prize in chemistry 2012

The 2012 Nobel prize in chemistry has been awarded to US-based scientists Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs).

There are around 800 known human GPCRs, of which about half are the olfactory receptors that allow us to distinguish thousands of different aromas. The other half regulate a vast number of biological processes, each one interacting with multiple different signalling molecules to transmit different messages into the cell, based on where they are in the body and what has bound to them.