Related papers: Beyond Olfaction: New Insights into Human Odorant …
Mammalian odorant binding proteins (OBPs) have long been suggested to transport hydrophobic odorant molecules through the aqueous environment of the nasal mucus. While the function of OBPs as odorant transporters is supported by their…
Increasing attention has been recently devoted to protein-based nanobiosensors. The main reason is the huge number of possible technological applications, going from drug detection to cancer early diagnosis. Their operating model is based…
The mechanism by which odorants are recognized by olfactory receptors remains primarily unresolved. While charge transport is believed to play a significant role, its precise nature is still unclear. Here, we present a novel perspective by…
Understanding how molecular structure gives rise to odor perception remains a long-standing challenge, with ongoing debate over whether olfaction is primarily governed by molecular shape, vibrational properties, or their interplay at the…
Predicting olfactory perception directly from molecular structure is central to fragrance design that plays a role in a wide range of industries, such as perfumery, food and beverage, and health care. Among olfactory attributes, odor…
The sense of smell is an important part of living organisms. It assists with the interaction of the living organism with its environment. The mechanism by which smell is detected and identified is not fully known. Earlier, shape theory was…
Olfaction -- how molecules are perceived as odors to humans -- remains poorly understood. Recently, the principal odor map (POM) was introduced to digitize the olfactory properties of single compounds. However, smells in real life are not…
Olfaction, the sense of smell, has received scant attention from a signal processing perspective in comparison to audition and vision. In this paper, we develop a signal processing paradigm for olfactory signals based on new scientific…
In this paper we explore relevant electrical properties of two olfactory receptors (ORs), one from rat OR I7 and the other from human OR 17-40, which are of interest for the realization of smell nanobiosensors. The investigation compares…
Humankind mimics the processes and strategies that nature has perfected and uses them as a model to address its problems. That has recently found a new direction, i.e., a novel communication technology called molecular communication (MC),…
The olfactory system removes correlations in natural odors using a network of inhibitory neurons in the olfactory bulb. It has been proposed that this network integrates the response from all olfactory receptors and inhibits them equally.…
In color vision, the quantitative rules for mixing lights to make a target color are well understood. By contrast, the rules for mixing odorants to make a target odor remain elusive. A solution to this problem in vision relied on…
Our sense of smell relies on sensitive, selective atomic-scale processes that are initiated when a scent molecule meets specific receptors in the nose. However, the physical mechanisms of detection are not clear. While odorant shape and…
The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filters that extract molecular features…
Advances in neural sensing technology are making it possible to observe the olfactory process in great detail. In this paper, we conceptualize smell from a Data Science and AI perspective, that relates the properties of odorants to how they…
Selectivity of olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) is compared with that of its receptor proteins (R) with fluctuations of odor binding-releasing process taken into account. The binding-releasing process is modeled as N Bernoulli trials, where…
We introduce and study an artificial neural network, inspired by the probabilistic Receptor Affinity Distribution model of olfaction. Our system consists on N sensory neurons whose outputs converge on a single processing linear threshold…
The reshaping and decorrelation of similar activity patterns by neuronal networks can enhance their discriminability, storage, and retrieval. How can such networks learn to decorrelate new complex patterns, as they arise in the olfactory…
We present a model of an olfactory system that performs odor segmentation. Based on the anatomy and physiology of natural olfactory systems, it consists of a pair of coupled modules, bulb and cortex. The bulb encodes the odor inputs as…
Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent…