Compounds without borders: A mechanism for quantifying complex odors and responses to scent-pollution in bumblebees

PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Apr 22;16(4):e1007765. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007765. eCollection 2020 Apr.

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.

MeSH terms

  • Air Pollutants* / analysis
  • Air Pollutants* / chemistry
  • Animals
  • Appetitive Behavior / physiology*
  • Bees / physiology*
  • Computational Biology
  • Models, Biological*
  • Odorants / analysis*

Substances

  • Air Pollutants

Grants and funding

The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.