Reply to Hettinger: Olfaction is a physical and a chemical sense in Drosophila
Name
Franco-2011-Aug-Reply to Hettinger_.pdf
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Author(s)
Franco, Maria Isabel
Turin, Luca
Mershin, Andreas
Skoulakis, Efthimios M. C.
Date Issued
August 2011
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Franco, M. I. et al. “Reply to Hettinger: Olfaction Is a Physical and a Chemical Sense in Drosophila.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.31 (2011): E350–E350. Web.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We would like to thank Dr. Hettinger (1) for his positive comment on our results showing that flies can discriminate isotopes by smell and are capable of cross-learning between odorants sharing a molecular vibration. Our article (2) demonstrated the presence of a physical (vibrational) component to odor character necessitating a vibration-sensing mechanism, the nature of which was not addressed experimentally and remains to be elucidated. We suggest that it likely involves inelastic electron tunneling, because this is consistent with our experimental data and with Brookes et al. (3), who have shown that an inelastic tunneling mechanism in olfaction is physically plausible. As pointed out by Luca Turin, this odorant detection mechanism does not require generation of free electrons by NADPH (4) and offers a potential explanation to why most enantiomer pairs smell identical. Further, Takane and Mitchell (5) have found IR spectra to be good predictors of odor character.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Biomedical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1107618108
