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Drosophila olfactory receptors as classifiers for volatiles from disparate real world applications

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posted on 2023-06-08, 18:46 authored by Thomas NowotnyThomas Nowotny, Marien de Bruyne, Amalia Z Berna, Coral G Warr, Stephen C Trowell
Olfactory receptors evolved to provide animals with ecologically and behaviourally relevant information. The resulting extreme sensitivity and discrimination has proven useful to humans, who have therefore co-opted some animals' sense of smell. One aim of machine olfaction research is to replace the use of animal noses and one avenue of such research aims to incorporate olfactory receptors into artificial noses. Here, we investigate how well the olfactory receptors of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, perform in classifying volatile odourants that they would not normally encounter. We collected a large number of in vivo recordings from individual Drosophila olfactory receptor neurons in response to an ecologically relevant set of 36 chemicals related to wine ('wine set') and an ecologically irrelevant set of 35 chemicals related to chemical hazards ('industrial set'), each chemical at a single concentration. Resampled response sets were used to classify the chemicals against all others within each set, using a standard linear support vector machine classifier and a wrapper approach. Drosophila receptors appear highly capable of distinguishing chemicals that they have not evolved to process. In contrast to previous work with metal oxide sensors, Drosophila receptors achieved the best recognition accuracy if the outputs of all 20 receptor types were used.

Funding

Green brain; G0924; EPSRC-ENGINEERING & PHYSICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH COUNCIL; EP/J019690/1

Systematic Benchmarking of Chemical Sensory Arrays; CSIRO Flagship Development Fund

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Published version

Journal

Bioinspiration and Biomimetics

ISSN

1748-3190

Publisher

IOP

Issue

4

Volume

9

Page range

1-13

Article number

a046007

Department affiliated with

  • Informatics Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2014-10-21

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2014-10-21

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2014-10-20

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