Teaching computers to I.D. odors
Though scientists have long known that mice can pick out scents — the smell of food, say, or the odor of a predator — they have been at a loss to explain how they are able to perform that seemingly complex task so easily. But a new study, led by Venkatesh Murthy, professor of molecular and cellular biology, suggests that the means of processing smells may be far simpler than researchers realized. Using a machine-learning algorithm, Murthy and colleagues were able to “train” a computer to recognize the neural patterns associated with various scents, and to identify whether specific odors were present in a mix of smells. The study is described in a Sept. 1 paper in the journal Neuron. Along with Murthy, the paper was co-authored by Alexander Mathis, Dan Rokni, and Vikrant Kapoor, postdoctoral fellows working in Murthy’s lab, and Professor Matthias Bethge from the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience...