ArticlePhysical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP2012
Vibrationally assisted electron transfer mechanism of olfaction: myth or reality?
Article in Physical chemistry chemical physics : PCCP, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Non-Markovian Electron Transfer in Ligand-Receptor Complexes: Insights from Non-Gaussian Anharmonic Baths.The journal of physical chemistry. B · 2026Article
- Non-markovian electron tunneling in SARS-CoV-2 virus infection in structured environments.PloS one · 2026Article
- Article
- Quantum Smell: Tunneling Mechanisms in Olfaction.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Non-Markovian Quantum State Diffusion for the tunnelling in SARS-COVID-19 virus.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025Article
- Tunneling Times in an Asymmetric Harmonic Double-Well with Application to Electron Transfers in Biological Macromolecules.ACS omega · 2024Article
- Vibration assisted electron tunnelling in COVID-19 infection using quantum state diffusion.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Quantum tunnelling in the context of SARS-CoV-2 infection.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Sensory Perception of Non-Deuterated and Deuterated Organic Compounds.Chemistry (Weinheim an der Bergstrasse, Germany) · 2021Article
- Exploring the mechanism of olfactory recognition in the initial stage by modeling the emission spectrum of electron transfer.PloS one · 2020Article
- Quantum biological tunnel junction for electron transfer imaging in live cells.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Article
- Quantifying Magnetic Sensitivity of Radical Pair Based Compass by Quantum Fisher Information.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Validity Examination of the Dissipative Quantum Model of Olfaction.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Experimental evaluation of the generalized vibrational theory of G protein-coupled receptor activation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- Quantum effects in biology: golden rule in enzymes, olfaction, photosynthesis and magnetodetection.Proceedings. Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2017Review
- Article
- Differential Odour Coding of Isotopomers in the Honeybee Brain.Scientific reports · 2016Article
- Article
- Implausibility of the vibrational theory of olfaction.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2015Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
Smell is a vital sense for animals. The mainstream explanation of smell is based on recognition of the odorant molecules through characteristics of their surface, e.g., shape, but certain experiments suggest that such recognition is complemented by recognition of vibrational modes. According to this suggestion an olfactory receptor is activated by electron transfer assisted through odorant vibrational excitation. The hundreds to thousands of different olfactory receptors in an animal recognize odorants over a discriminant landscape with surface properties and vibrational frequencies as the two major dimensions. In the present paper we introduce the vibrationally assisted mechanism of olfaction and demonstrate for several odorants that, indeed, a strong enhancement of an electron tunneling rate due to odorant vibrations can arise. We discuss in this regard the influence of odorant deuteration and explain, thereby, recent experiments performed on Drosophila melanogaster. Our demonstration is based on known physical properties of biological electron transfer and on ab initio calculations on odorants carried out for the purpose of the present study. We identify a range of physical characteristics which olfactory receptors and odorants must obey for the vibrationally assisted electron transfer mechanism to function. We argue that the stated characteristics are feasible for realistic olfactory receptors, noting, though, that the receptor structure presently is still unknown, but can be studied through homology modeling.
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