Exploring natural odour landscapes: A case study with implications for human-biting insects.
Exploring natural odour landscapes: A case study with implications for human-biting insects.
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探索自然气味景观：对人类叮咬昆虫影响的案例研究。
DOI：
10.1101/2023.05.08.539789
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发表时间：
2023
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
McBride,CarolynS
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Zung,JessicaL;Kotb,SumerM;McBride,CarolynS
自然界充满了气味——由潜在的食物来源、社会伙伴、捕食者和病原体散发的挥发性化学物质混合而成。动物在很大程度上依赖这些信号来生存和繁殖。然而，我们对化学世界的组成仍然非常无知。天然气味通常含有多少化合物？这些化合物在刺激物中共享的频率是多少？消除歧视的最佳统计策略是什么？回答这些问题将对大脑如何最有效地编码嗅觉信息提供至关重要的见解。在这里，我们进行了脊椎动物身体气味的第一次大规模调查，这是一组与吸血节肢动物相关的刺激。我们定量表征64种脊椎动物（主要是哺乳动物）的气味，代表29科13目。我们证实，这些刺激是由相对常见的、共有的化合物组成的复杂混合物，并表明它们比花香更不可能包含独特的成分——这一发现暗示了吸血动物和访花动物的嗅觉编码。我们还发现脊椎动物的身体气味携带很少的系统发育信息，但在一个物种内显示一致性。人类的气味尤其独特，甚至与其他类人猿的气味相比也是如此。最后，我们利用我们对气味空间统计的新理解，对嗅觉编码做出具体的预测，这与蚊子嗅觉系统的已知特征相一致。我们的工作提供了自然气味空间的第一个定量描述之一，并展示了如何理解感官环境的统计可以为感官编码和进化提供新的见解。
The natural world is full of odours—blends of volatile chemicals emitted by potential sources of food, social partners, predators, and pathogens. Animals rely heavily on these signals for survival and reproduction. Yet we remain remarkably ignorant of the composition of the chemical world. How many compounds do natural odours typically contain? How often are those compounds shared across stimuli? What are the best statistical strategies for discrimination? Answering these questions will deliver crucial insight into how brains can most efficiently encode olfactory information. Here, we undertake the first large-scale survey of vertebrate body odours, a set of stimuli relevant to blood-feeding arthropods. We quantitatively characterize the odour of 64 vertebrate species (mostly mammals), representing 29 families and 13 orders. We confirm that these stimuli are complex blends of relatively common, shared compounds and show that they are much less likely to contain unique components than are floral odours—a finding with implications for olfactory coding in blood feeders and floral visitors. We also find that vertebrate body odours carry little phylogenetic information, yet show consistency within a species. Human odour is especially unique, even compared to the odour of other great apes. Finally, we use our newfound understanding of odour-space statistics to make specific predictions about olfactory coding, which align with known features of mosquito olfactory systems. Our work provides one of the first quantitative descriptions of a natural odour space and demonstrates how understanding the statistics of sensory environments can provide novel insight into sensory coding and evolution.