New Approach to Understanding the Sense of Smell

A conceptual framework like the one engineers use for characterizing the transmission of sound and electrical signals can be useful in studying how olfaction—the sense of smell—is influenced by the air flow that carries odor molecules, according to a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of Colorado—Boulder. The new approach could lead to a better understanding of how olfaction works and better designs for artificial olfaction. Credit: APS, PRX Life and Ella Maru Studio The work was a collaboration between Dr. Jonathan Victor , the Fred Plum Professor of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a team of fluid dynamics experts at the University of Colorado—Boulder, including postdoctoral researcher Dr. Elle Stark; Dr. Aaron True, assistant research professor; and Dr. John Crimaldi, professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering, and funded by the National Science Foundation. In a study published May 13 in PRX Life, the researchers considered the question of how the movement of air between the source of odor molecules and a sensor—such as an olfactory-receptor cell within a nose—affects the received olfactory signal. They noted that olfaction increasingly is appreciated as a “fast sense,” capable of and perhaps largely adapted for detecting rapid fluctuations in odor signals. Approaching the problem much as engineers approach the problem of audio or electrical transmission, they looked at how the patterns of these fluctuations are transformed by turbulent air between source and sensor. In essence, their approach maps time-varying odor signals onto a spectrum of frequencies, and then uses mathematical analysis and computer simulations to study how this spectrum is altered by the dynamics of odor molecules in turbulent air flows. The researchers showed that airflow principally causes three types of changes in the frequency composition of the odor signal: a weakening of higher frequencies relative to lower frequencies (“frequency filtering”), a spreading out of frequencies around each source frequency (“frequency spreading”), and generation of new frequencies even if the odor source is constant (“frequency production”). These processes, together with factors such as distance between source and sensor and the rate at which odor molecules naturally diffuse through the air, led the researchers to a new quantitative framework for evaluating odor signal transmission in different environments. “This new framework is already useful in understanding how animals navigate their environments using odor signals, and in recreating naturalistic odor signals in the laboratory. We expect that it will also prove useful in understanding how and why those capacities evolved, how olfaction is affected by aging and disease, and how to design artificial olfaction systems for robotics applications,” said Dr. Victor, who is also a member of the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine. . Category: From the News Room Source link: https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2026/08/new-approach-to-understanding-the-se...