Perfume smells different to each of us
Ever imagined why it is so difficult to buy perfume for a loved one? People experience odours in a completely different way, a new study has found.
Researchers from the Monell Center and collaborating institutions have found that as much as 30% of the large array of human olfactory receptor differs between any two individuals.
This substantial variation is in turn reflected by variability in how each person perceives odours.
Humans have about 400 different types of specialized sensors, known as olfactory receptor proteins , that somehow work together to detect a large variety of odours.
“Understanding how this huge array of receptors encodes odours is a challenging task,” said study lead author Joel Mainland, a molecular biologist at Monell. “The activation pattern of these 400 receptors encodes both the intensity of an odour and the quality — for example , whether it smells like vanilla or smoke — for the tens of thousands of different odours that represent everything we smell,” he said in Nature Neuroscience.
The underlying amino acid sequence can vary slightly for each of the 400 receptor proteins, resulting in one or more variants for each of the receptors. Each receptor variant responds to odours in a slightly different way and the variants are distributed across individuals such that nearly everyone has a unique combination of olfactory receptors.
Source: Agencies
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