CNI Speaker Series: Joel Mainland

Joel Mainland, Monell Chemical Senses Center

Digitizing Olfaction: Using receptor responses to map odor space

If you have a modern phone you can capture a visual scene as a photograph, alter it, send it to a friend in another country nearly instantaneously, and store it so you can look at it for years to come with no degradation. None of this is currently possible in olfaction. Although perfumers and flavorists are adept at mixing odorous molecules to produce a desired perceptual effect, the rules underlying this process are poorly understood at a quantitative level. One recent model suggests that this problem is tractable, but only for cases where all component molecules in a complex mixture are diluted to have equal perceived intensity. Extending this model to incorporate changes in the concentration of each component molecule would allow us to design “primary odors” and map olfactory perceptual space. Here, we will discuss our efforts to use human psychophysics in combination with receptor responses to address this problem.

A pizza lunch will be served at 12pm, and the talk will begin at 12:15pm.