Compounds without borders: A mechanism for quantifying complex odors and responses to scent-pollution in bumblebees.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 32320390.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007765 and PMC identifier 7197864.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Recent work has indicated that anthropogenic pollution of floral-scent may have negative impacts on bumblebee foraging behavior. We need quantitative tools to both measure how much pollution of a learned floral-odor bumblebees can tolerate and identify which scent-pollutants are problematic. This study used encoding characteristics of insect olfactory systems to develop a new paradigm for quantifying complex odors. This 'Compounds Without Borders' method builds multidimensional vectors of scents based on physiologically relevant physical characteristics of component odorant-compounds. The angular distance between CWB-vectors then provides a single quantitative variable describing how similar (or dissimilar) two complex odors are. This angular representation of odor similarity is predictive of bumblebees' behavior in an associative odor learning task.
Medical subject headings
- Air Pollutants
- Appetitive Behavior
- Bees
- Models, Biological
- Odorants