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Metabolic activity organizes olfactory representations

Wesley W. Qian, Jennifer N. Wei, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Brian K. Lee, Yunan Luo, Marnix Vlot, Koen Dechering, Jian Peng, View ORCID ProfileRichard C. Gerkin, Alexander B. Wiltschko
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.21.500995
Wesley W. Qian
1Google Research, Brain Team; Cambridge, MA, USA
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Jennifer N. Wei
1Google Research, Brain Team; Cambridge, MA, USA
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Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling
1Google Research, Brain Team; Cambridge, MA, USA
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Brian K. Lee
1Google Research, Brain Team; Cambridge, MA, USA
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Yunan Luo
2Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois; Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
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Marnix Vlot
3TropIQ Health Sciences, Netherlands
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Koen Dechering
3TropIQ Health Sciences, Netherlands
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Jian Peng
2Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois; Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
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Richard C. Gerkin
1Google Research, Brain Team; Cambridge, MA, USA
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  • ORCID record for Richard C. Gerkin
Alexander B. Wiltschko
1Google Research, Brain Team; Cambridge, MA, USA
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  • For correspondence: alexbw@googlemail.com
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Abstract

Hearing and vision sensory systems are tuned to the natural statistics of acoustic and electromagnetic energy on earth, and are evolved to be sensitive in ethologically relevant ranges. But what are the natural statistics of odors, and how do olfactory systems exploit them? Dissecting an accurate machine learning model1 for human odor perception, we find a computable representation for odor at the molecular level that can predict the odor-evoked receptor, neural, and behavioral responses of nearly all terrestrial organisms studied in olfactory neuroscience. Using this olfactory representation (Principal Odor Map, POM), we find that odorous compounds with similar POM representations are more likely to co-occur within a substance and be metabolically closely related; metabolic reaction sequences2 also follow smooth paths in POM despite large jumps in molecular structure. Just as the brain’s visual representations have evolved around the natural statistics of light and shapes, the natural statistics of metabolism appear to shape the brain’s representation of the olfactory world.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • Changed "primary odor map" to "principal odor map" for consistency with other forthcoming works.

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted August 20, 2022.
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Metabolic activity organizes olfactory representations
Wesley W. Qian, Jennifer N. Wei, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Brian K. Lee, Yunan Luo, Marnix Vlot, Koen Dechering, Jian Peng, Richard C. Gerkin, Alexander B. Wiltschko
bioRxiv 2022.07.21.500995; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.21.500995
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Metabolic activity organizes olfactory representations
Wesley W. Qian, Jennifer N. Wei, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Brian K. Lee, Yunan Luo, Marnix Vlot, Koen Dechering, Jian Peng, Richard C. Gerkin, Alexander B. Wiltschko
bioRxiv 2022.07.21.500995; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.07.21.500995

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