Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Zhou Y
PROVIDER: S-EPMC6114987 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Aug
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Zhou Yuansheng Y Smith Brian H BH Sharpee Tatyana O TO
Science advances 20180829 8
In the natural environment, the sense of smell, or olfaction, serves to detect toxins and judge nutritional content by taking advantage of the associations between compounds as they are created in biochemical reactions. This suggests that the nervous system can classify odors based on statistics of their co-occurrence within natural mixtures rather than from the chemical structures of the ligands themselves. We show that this statistical perspective makes it possible to map odors to points in a ...[more]