ORDB currently houses chemosensory receptors for more than 50 organisms.
ORDB contains public and private sections which provide tools for investigators to analyze the functions of these very large gene families of G protein-coupled receptors. It also provides links to a local cluster of databases of related information in SenseLab, and to other relevant databases worldwide.

The database aims to house all of the known olfactory receptor and chemoreceptor sequences in both nucleotide and amino acid form and serves four main purposes:

• It is a repository of olfactory receptor sequences.
• It provides tools for sequence analysis.
• It supports similarity searches (screens) which reduces duplicate work.
• It provides links to other types of receptor information, e.g. 3D models.

The database is accessible to two classes of users:

• General public www users have full access to all the public sequences, models and resources in the database.
• Source laboratories are the laboratories that clone olfactory receptors and submit sequences in the private or public database. They can search any sequence they deposited to the database against any private or public sequence in the database. This user level is suited for laboratories that are actively cloning olfactory receptors. are actively cloning olfactory receptors.