The sense of smell appears to work better with mixtures of odourants than with single chemicals

What is it about?

In sensory systems it is generally challenging to recognise stimuli across different intensities. In the sense of smell, this challenge takes the form of recognising the identity of an odour regardless of its concentration. Building a mathematical model of how the sense of smell works in insects, we found that contrary to our intuition, recognising odours at different concentrations was easier when the odour was a mixture of many odourants rather than a pure odour. And it appears, the more complex the mixture of odourants, the easier the recognition across concentrations.

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Why is it important?

Understanding the sense of smell is a problem of general scientific interest but understanding how insects process odours is also of practical importance because insects play an important role in transmitting devastating diseases such as malaria. The sense of smell is an essential tool for insects to locate their hosts and understanding it better might in the future lead to new methods to disrupt insects' host seeking behaviours and hence their role in the transmission of diseases.