ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Individual olfactory perception reveals meaningful nonolfactory genetic information.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed, 70 citations in OpenAlex.
- The human brain modulates sniffs according to fine-grained perceptual features of odours.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Sniffing dynamics reflect fine differences in perception of odours.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Demographic and geographical determinants of human olfactory perception of 909 individuals inhabiting 16 regions.iScience · 2025Article
- Motor Cortex Disinhibition Correlates with Olfactory Dysfunction in Parkinson's Disease.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2025Article
- Potential Therapeutic Exploitation of G Protein-Coupled Receptor 120 (GPR120/FFAR4) Signaling in Obesity-Related Metabolic Disorders.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Long non-coding RNA variability in porcine skeletal muscle.Journal of applied genetics · 2024Article
- Olfactory perceptual fingerprints of people with olfactory dysfunction and healthy controls.Laryngoscope investigative otolaryngology · 2024Article
- Decomposition of an odorant in olfactory perception and neural representation.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Chemosensory Ability and Sensitivity in Health and Disease: Epigenetic Regulation and COVID-19.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Cortical field maps across human sensory cortex.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2023Review
- A behavioral paradigm for measuring perceptual distances in mice.Cell reports methods · 2022Article
- A 3D transcriptomics atlas of the mouse nose sheds light on the anatomical logic of smell.Cell reports · 2022Article
- An olfactory self-test effectively screens for COVID-19.Communications medicine · 2022Article
- Mid-Luteal Olfactory Abilities Reveal Healthy Women's Emotional and Cognitive Functions.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2022Article
- Do all mice smell the same? Chemosensory cues from inbred and wild mouse strains elicit stereotypic sensory representations in the accessory olfactory bulb.BMC biology · 2021Article
- Genetic gateways to COVID-19 infection: Implications for risk, severity, and outcomes.FASEB journal : official publication of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology · 2020Review
- Consequences of undetected olfactory loss for human chemosensory communication and well-being.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Pleasant body odours, but not genetic similarity, influence trustworthiness in a modified trust game.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Human Olfaction without Apparent Olfactory Bulbs.Neuron · 2020Article
- SmellSpace: An Odor-Based Social Network as a Platform for Collecting Olfactory Perceptual Data.Chemical senses · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
11 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Each person expresses a potentially unique subset of ∼ 400 different olfactory receptor subtypes. Given that the receptors we express partially determine the odors we smell, it follows that each person may have a unique nose; to capture this, we devised a sensitive test of olfactory perception we termed the "olfactory fingerprint." Olfactory fingerprints relied on matrices of perceived odorant similarity derived from descriptors applied to the odorants. We initially fingerprinted 89 individuals using 28 odors and 54 descriptors. We found that each person had a unique olfactory fingerprint (P < 10(-10)), which was odor specific but descriptor independent. We could identify individuals from this pool using randomly selected sets of 7 odors and 11 descriptors alone. Extrapolating from this data, we determined that using 34 odors and 35 descriptors we could individually identify each of the 7 billion people on earth. Olfactory perception, however, fluctuates over time, calling into question our proposed perceptual readout of presumably stable genetic makeup. To test whether fingerprints remain informative despite this temporal fluctuation, building on the linkage between olfactory receptors and HLA, we hypothesized that olfactory perception may relate to HLA. We obtained olfactory fingerprints and HLA typing for 130 individuals, and found that olfactory fingerprint matching using only four odorants was significantly related to HLA matching (P < 10(-4)), such that olfactory fingerprints can save 32% of HLA tests in a population screen (P < 10(-6)). In conclusion, a precise measure of olfactory perception reveals meaningful nonolfactory genetic information.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.