ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Transport features predict if a molecule is odorous.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 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
29 citing papers in PubMed.
- Machine learning reveals structural determinants of odor detection thresholds and identifies high-potency food odorants.NPJ science of food · 2026Article
- Decoding Smell from Receptor Structure.Research square · 2026Article
- Machine learning for smell: ordinal odor strength prediction of molecular perfumery components.RSC advances · 2026Article
- Low rank adaptation of chemical foundation models generates effective odorant representations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Decoding odor responses: universal patterns and individual signatures in psychophysiology using nonlinear models.Chemical senses · 2026Article
- Sensory-Chemical Co-Dynamics inFoods (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Article
- Fibronectin in the olfactory mucus increases sensitivity of olfactory receptor response to odorants.Science advances · 2025Article
- Odors as cognitive constructs: history of odor classification and attempts to map odor percepts to physical and chemical parameters.Chemical senses · 2025Review
- Distinct odorant receptor response patterns to aliphatic odorants in freely behaving mice.Chemical senses · 2025Article
- Airway sensory systems: breathing new life into microbiota-brain communication.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2025Review
- Accelerating Ligand Discovery for Insect Odorant Receptors.International journal of biological sciences · 2025Article
- Perceptual constancy for an odor is acquired through changes in primary sensory neurons.Science advances · 2024Article
- Taste enhances the ability to express a preference for a congruent odor in rats.Behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Pyrfume: A window to the world's olfactory data.Scientific data · 2024Article
- Nature and human well-being: The olfactory pathway.Science advances · 2024Review
- Predicting and improving complex beer flavor through machine learning.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Neural Circuits for Fast Poisson Compressed Sensing in the Olfactory Bulb.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- A principal odor map unifies diverse tasks in olfactory perception.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Bitter Odorants and Odorous Bitters: Toxicity and Human TAS2R Targets.Journal of agricultural and food chemistry · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In studies of vision and audition, stimuli can be chosen to span the visible or audible spectrum; in olfaction, the axes and boundaries defining the analogous odorous space are unknown. As a result, the population of olfactory space is likewise unknown, and anecdotal estimates of 10,000 odorants have endured. The journey a molecule must take to reach olfactory receptors (ORs) and produce an odor percept suggests some chemical criteria for odorants: a molecule must 1) be volatile enough to enter the air phase, 2) be nonvolatile and hydrophilic enough to sorb into the mucous layer coating the olfactory epithelium, 3) be hydrophobic enough to enter an OR binding pocket, and 4) activate at least one OR. Here, we develop a simple and interpretable quantitative model that reliably predicts whether a molecule is odorous or odorless based solely on the first three criteria. Applying our model to a database of all possible small organic molecules, we estimate that at least 40 billion possible compounds are odorous, six orders of magnitude larger than current estimates of 10,000. With this model in hand, we can define the boundaries of olfactory space in terms of molecular volatility and hydrophobicity, enabling representative sampling of olfactory stimulus space.
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.