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Humans have about 400 odor receptors. Elephants have about 2,000, the largest number in animals. But based on how many transcription factor genes are in plants, plants may be able to detect many more odors than animals.
— Professor Kazushige Touhara, whose team at the University of Tokyo "have discovered the first steps of how information from odor molecules changes gene expression in plants". Read more at Plants can smell, now researchers know how at ScienceDaily.
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If they were exposed to the smell of cookies for thirty seconds or less, they were more likely to pick the cookie. But when they smelled it for longer than two minutes, they were more likely to pick strawberries.
— Read more at The Nose May Know When It Comes To Food Choice at WLRN Public Radio and Television.
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New research from the University of Washington and NOAA Fisheries' Northwest Fisheries Science Center shows this powerful sense of smell might be in trouble as carbon emissions continue to be absorbed by our ocean. Ocean acidification is changing the water's chemistry and lowering its pH. Specifically, higher levels of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in the water can affect the ways in which coho salmon process and respond to smells.
— Read more at Salmon may lose the ability to smell danger as carbon emissions rise at Science Daily.
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Our study was looking at how olfactory receptors and brain structures cope with mixtures and single odorants. At first, we thought that mixtures would mean complications but it turned out there was no extra complications and in fact, it's usually easier to smell mixtures than single odorants and the sensing is also slightly faster. This wasn't what we expected but this is what came out from our mathematical investigation.
— Thomas Nowotny of University of Sussex, quoted in Smelling the forest not the trees: Why animals are better at sniffing complex smells at Science Daily.
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Sharpee and her colleagues analyzed odor molecules found in four familiar and unmistakable scents: strawberries, tomatoes, blueberries and mouse urine. The researchers calculated how often and in what concentrations certain molecules turned up together in these scents. They then created a mathematical model in which molecules that occurred together frequently were represented as closer in space and molecules that rarely did so were farther apart. The result was a “saddle”-shaped surface—a hallmark of a field called hyperbolic geometry, which obeys different rules from the geometry most people learn in school.
— Tatyana Sharpee is a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. She and her colleagues are working on ways to map odors. Read more at Unraveling the Mathematics of Smell at Scientific American, or see the research paper at Hyperbolic geometry of the olfactory space at Science Advances.