Compounds without borders: A mechanism for quantifying complex odors and responses to scent-pollution in bumblebees.
<h4>Author summary</h4>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-...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2020-04-01
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| Series: | PLoS Computational Biology |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007765 |
| Summary: | <h4>Author summary</h4>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. |
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| ISSN: | 1553-734X 1553-7358 |