Deep Nose may one day be the best diagnostician in medicine

Re:Deep Nose may one day be the best diagnostician in medicine by tgbugs on Sunday February 07, 2021 @01:04PM (#26056745)

If you haven't read "What the fly’s nose tells the fly’s brain" [0] take a look. It helps explain why the olfactory sensors might actually be selected to have wide spectrum sensitivity (it's a feature not a bug).

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4522789/

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Re:Deep Nose may one day be the best diagnostician in medicine by favoritecolor on Monday February 08, 2021 @07:46AM (#26063733)

Thanks for the link! Cool to think about how the evolution of smell has optimized for "a maximum entropy code."

I totally agree, it's a feature not a bug. A wide spectrum is absolutely an essential feature for an animal to sense thousands (to millions) of different chemicals without thousands (to millions) of different receptors. So, calling olfactory receptors "just plain horrible proteins" was a bit rude to them, haha!

However, in my opinion, digital sensors based on olfactory receptors have and will continue to suffer from such wide spectra and poor sensitivities.

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