Predicting human olfactory perception from chemical features of odor molecules

TLDR

The smell of a molecule remains largely unpredictable, as we still do not understand how a given substance will be perceived. An international crowd‑sourced competition provided teams with a large database of human odor ratings and comprehensive molecular descriptors, prompting them to develop algorithms linking chemical features to perceived smell qualities. The best models that emerged from this challenge could accurately predict how a new molecule would smell. Keller et al.

Abstract

How will this molecule smell? We still do not understand what a given substance will smell like. Keller et al. launched an international crowd-sourced competition in which many teams tried to solve how the smell of a molecule will be perceived by humans. The teams were given access to a database of responses from subjects who had sniffed a large number of molecules and been asked to rate each smell across a range of different qualities. The teams were also given a comprehensive list of the physical and chemical features of the molecules smelled. The teams produced algorithms to predict the correspondence between the quality of each smell and a given molecule. The best models that emerged from this challenge could accurately predict how a new molecule would smell. Science , this issue p. 820