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Chemical Senses Advance Access originally published online on December 10, 2008
Chemical Senses 2009 34(2):151-158; doi:10.1093/chemse/bjn071
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Relationship between Peripheral Receptor Code and Perceived Odor Quality

Yuichi Furudono1, Yukio Sone1, Kayori Takizawa1, Junzo Hirono2 and Takaaki Sato2

1 Tobacco Science Research Center, Japan Tobacco Inc., 6-2 Umegaoka, Yokohama, Aoba-ku, Kanagawa 227-8512, Japan 2 Research Institute for Cell Engineering, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 3-11-46 Nakoji, Amagasaki, Hyogo 661-0974, Japan

Correspondence to be sent to: Yuichi Furudono, Tobacco Science Research Center, Japan Tobacco Inc., 6-2 Umegaoka, Yokohama, Aoba-ku, Kanagawa 227-8512, Japan. e-mail: yuichi.furudono{at}ims.jti.co.jp


  Abstract

The discrimination of thousands of odorants is mediated by several hundred olfactory receptors (ORs). It is generally accepted that the main strategy in encoding odor quality is a combinatorial receptor code scheme, in which odorants are discriminated by different sets of ORs. In the present study, we classified 12 test odorants by their receptor codes and perceived odor qualities to examine whether odorants showing similar receptor codes are also similar in their odor qualities. Similarities of receptor codes between odorants were estimated by the overlapping responses of murine isolated olfactory sensory neurons. In contrast, we conducted a human sensory test to classify the test odorants according to their odor qualities. Despite the difference in species, the groupings of the test odorants were well conserved between receptor code and odor quality. These findings indicate that odorants that are discriminated by murine receptor codes are perceived as different odors by humans and further suggest that similarity of receptor codes correlates with that of odor quality, at least in our test odorants at the concentrations tested.

Key words: calcium imaging, cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, olfactory sensory neuron

Accepted 13 November 2008


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