Meeting a 100-Year-Old Challenge Could Lead the Way to Digital Aromas

 

Master perfumers blend fragrances that promise mystery, intrigue, and forbidden thrills, and their recipes are kept secret. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have successfully recorded and mapped how people perceive even complex blends of odor in a new study on the sense of smell, rather than revealing the odor secret ingredients. 

The molecular structure of any complex odor can now be used to predict how it will smell. This research may not only change the closed industry of perfumery, but also lead to the ability to digitize and instantly reproduce smells. Neurobiologists, computer scientists, and a master perfumer developed and funded the proposed framework for odors, which was published in Nature. It was funded by a European initiative for future emerging technologies (FET-OPEN). According to Professor N O A-M S O B E-L of the Institute's Neurobiology Department, "Alexander Graham Bell first proposed the challenge of plotting smells in an organized and logical manner over 100 years ago". Bell issued the following ultimatum: From the scent of roses and violets, we have a wide range of smells. However, you cannot have a science of odor until you can measure their similarities and differences. Up until this point, this problem had remained unsolved

Indeed, this century-old problem demonstrated how difficult it is to organize smells logically. Our noses contain millions of odor receptors, each of which is made up of hundreds of distinct subtypes and is designed to recognize particular molecular characteristics. 

These single molecules can be mixed and matched in a variety of intensities to create millions of smells for our senses. As a result, mapping this data has been difficult. However, his coworkers, led by graduate student R A-V I-A and Dr K-O B-I, discovered that odors have a fundamental order. They used Bell's idea to arrive at this conclusion, which was to describe the relationships between smells as they are perceived rather than the smells themselves. 

In a series of experiments, the team gave volunteer participants pairs of smells and asked them to rate how similar they looked to one another on a similarity scale from "identical" to "extremely different", where "identical" is the highest value. In the initial experiment, the team created 14 aromatic blends with approximately ten molecular components each and presented them to nearly 200 volunteers, two at a time, resulting in 95 pairs being evaluated by each volunteer at the conclusion of the experiment

Any two odor can be predicted to be similar using this method, which can also be used to predict how they will eventually smell 

The "smell map" or "metric" can also be used to predict how an odor will ultimately smell because it predicts how similar any two odors are. For instance, any novel odor that is less than 0.05 radians from a banana will smell exactly like it. The novel odor will smell like a banana as it gets further away from the banana; after a certain distance, it will stop smelling like a banana. 

Currently, the team is working on a web-based tool. Not only can this set of tools predict how a new odor will smell, but they can also design odor. Using the map and metric, one can, for instance, make a new perfume from any perfume with a known set of ingredients that has exactly the same scent as the original perfume. Color, or non-overlapping spectral compositions that produce the same perceived color, are creations of color vision. In this case, the team produced olfactory. 

Prof David of the Computer and Applied Mathematics Department, and was a co-author of the study, had this vision, and the findings of the study are a significant step toward realizing it: making it possible for computers to digitize and reproduce smells. 

Giving computers the ability to interpret odors in the same way that humans do could have an impact on environmental monitoring, the biomedical industry, and the food industry, to name a few, as well as the ability to add realistic sea or flower aromas to your vacation photos on social media. However, master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, who is also a co-author of the study, states that for the time being, he is not concerned about his occupation