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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · Aug 12

New preprint from the very talented Bob Pellegrino! 🧪

Bob Pellegrino @kingfunk.bsky.social · Aug 12

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Odor intensity isn’t just about concentration! We have a new preprint to prove it: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

In cahoots with @jmainland.bsky.social, @alexkoulakov.bsky.social, Rick Gerkin, Khristina Samoilova and others not on bluesky. 🧪

Which of these molecules smells stronger?

Chemical structure of acetophenone and 2-heptanone

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Science X / Phys.org @sciencex.bsky.social · Jul 30

Analysis of over 21,000 individuals identifies seven new genetic regions linked to odor perception, with some effects differing between men and women and connections to Alzheimer's risk. doi.org/g9vn4j

How do our genes influence our sense of smell? Study finds sex-specific effects

How we smell is not just a matter of taste—it's also influenced by our genes. An international team of researchers led by scientists from Leipzig University has conducted the largest genetic study to date on the human sense of smell.

medicalxpress.com

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · Jul 22

In May we launched the DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025. The leaderboard round closed yesterday and 71 teams submitted predictions! Even if you missed the leaderboard phase, you can still submit a final model for the August 8th deadline.

Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

With a contemporary smartphone, capturing, transmitting, and replicating sounds and visuals is a breeze, yet replicating scents remains elusive. If you want to change this, consider joining the 2025 DREAM Olfaction Challenge at www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6....
@oldbap.bsky.social

DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025

'DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025' (Synapse ID: syn64743570) is a project on Synapse. Synapse is a platform for supporting scientific collaborations centered around shared biomed...

www.synapse.org

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

My favorite part of these challenges is actually after the competition closes. All participants get together and work collaboratively on a manuscript summarizing key insights and where the field stands. Join us! www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6...

DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025

'DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025' (Synapse ID: syn64743570) is a project on Synapse. Synapse is a platform for supporting scientific collaborations centered around shared biomed...

www.synapse.org

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

Building on last year's Mixture Discriminability Challenge, we're offering a dataset of 650+ blends, each assessed by trained panelists using a 51-word scent lexicon.

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

Most existing models predict odor perception at just one concentration. Yet, some odorants dramatically shift in quality as concentration changes—such as grapefruit mercaptan, pleasantly fruity at low concentrations but distinctly sulfurous at high levels.

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

This year, we have two challenges: 1) Predicting how odor quality changes with concentration, and 2) Describing an olfactory mixture. You can make up to three leaderboard submissions until July 21st, with one final submission allowed before August 8th.

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

Last year, we ran the second DREAM Olfaction Prediction Challenge www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn5... . This time focusing on predicting the similarity of mixture pairs.

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

Ten years ago the first DREAM Olfaction Prediction Challenge launched to predict the smell of a molecule from its structure. This led to a publication establishing benchmarks doi.org/10.1126/scie... , and then a subsequent surge in predictive modeling.

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · May 7

With a contemporary smartphone, capturing, transmitting, and replicating sounds and visuals is a breeze, yet replicating scents remains elusive. If you want to change this, consider joining the 2025 DREAM Olfaction Challenge at www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn6....
@oldbap.bsky.social

DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025

'DREAM Olfactory Mixtures Prediction Challenge 2025' (Synapse ID: syn64743570) is a project on Synapse. Synapse is a platform for supporting scientific collaborations centered around shared biomed...

www.synapse.org

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Kevin Hall @kevinh-phd.bsky.social · Apr 16

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology.

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Amanda Therrien @amandastherrien.bsky.social · Mar 7

📢 TODAY’S THE DAY, PHILLY! 📢 We #standupforscience at 11 AM at City Hall!

We’ve got a great lineup of speakers for you (North Apron) and opportunities for other advocacy activities (Dillworth Park).

Hope to see you there!!
#standupforsciencephilly

The final speaker lineup for the Philly Stand Up for Science Rally.

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Thomas Bozza @neuroboz.bsky.social · Mar 6

Check out our review comparing typical experimental to naturally-occurring odor concentrations. You might be surprised.
www.jneurosci.org/content/45/1...
Thanks to Matt and Betty for asking me to take part!

Recalibrating Olfactory Neuroscience to the Range of Naturally Occurring Odor Concentrations

Sensory systems enable organisms to detect and respond to environmental signals relevant for their survival and reproduction. A crucial aspect of any sensory signal is its intensity; understanding how...

www.jneurosci.org

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Derek Lowe @dereklowe.bsky.social · Feb 4

A long post about what’s happening to the science funding agencies in the US and why. As mentioned, this one just kept getting longer even as I kept stripping curse words from it.

www.science.org/content/blog...

What's Happening Inside the NIH and NSF

www.science.org

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · Feb 3

SOME GOOD NEWS ABOUT NIH FUNDING

Closed sessions of institute and center Advisory Counsel meetings are now permitted. This is where grant applications are discussed and approved for potential funding.

Open sessions where there are public presentations and discussions are still not allowed.

a man with glasses and a black shirt says " it 's a small step that really goes a long way "

ALT: a man with glasses and a black shirt says " it 's a small step that really goes a long way "

media.tenor.com

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Bob Pellegrino @kingfunk.bsky.social · Jan 26

Alexander Fjaeldstad and I have a new chapter in the book Smell, Taste, Eat: The Role of the Chemical Senses in Eating Behaviour, edited by @LorenzoDStafford. Lots of great insights here.

From our chapter, it’s clear that smell loss and its impact on ingestion remain vastly underexplored."

The Effect of Olfactory Disorder (and Other Chemosensory Disorders) on Perception, Acceptance, and Consumption of Food

People with changes in the overall sensory experience of food often complain of taste disturbances, although the problem is normally caused by the loss of aroma in the food (thus an olfactory disorder...

link.springer.com

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Gabriele Uhl @uhl-lab.bsky.social · Jan 6

doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
Olfaction in spiders. We found that the wall pore sensilla in spiders look similar from the outside to those of insects, but differ ultrastructurally in various ways. Independent evolution!
🧪

Olfaction with legs—Spiders use wall-pore sensilla for pheromone detection | PNAS

The sense of smell is a central sensory modality of most terrestrial species. However, our knowledge of olfaction is based on vertebrates and insec...

doi.org

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Alex Koulakov @alexkoulakov.bsky.social · Dec 13

Our DeepNose paper is in arxiv. In it, we present an equivariant CNN which can predict human olfactory perception based on molecular shapes, including mixtures. Comments/suggestions are very welcome.
arxiv.org/abs/2412.08747

DeepNose: An Equivariant Convolutional Neural Network Predictive Of Human Olfactory Percepts

The olfactory system employs responses of an ensemble of odorant receptors (ORs) to sense molecules and to generate olfactory percepts. Here we hypothesized that ORs can be viewed as 3D spatial filter...

arxiv.org

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social · Dec 11

A background in physics, and his own curiosity, have helped Dmitry Rinberg tackle the complexities of the neuroscience of smell. More on Rinberg sniffing out the mysteries of olfaction.

By Lina Zeldovich

www.thetransmitter.org/olfaction/sn...

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · Dec 6

The core figure, showing review counts from Publons data, indeed shows the intended effect but buries the lede:

No one uses Publons anymore.

"Fig. 2 This figure illustrates reviewers’ average number of reviews before and after treatment. The x-axis represents the years, and the y-axis shows the
average number of reviews. The solid line on the x-axis at 2018 represents treatment (i.e., accolade award received), while the dashed lines in 2017 and
2019 differentiate the periods before and after treatment. Red line represents the control group (non-winners), while the blue one represents the
experimental group (winners). Before treatment, the trends in both groups are similar, with the experimental group showing higher values than the control
group, while after treatment, the experimental group shows lower values compared to the control group"

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Ben Hayden @benhayden.bsky.social · Nov 22

Important paper!

www.biorxiv.org/content/bior...

Im not sure the Discussion fully delineates its radical implications.

No more...

* Place cells
* Grid cells, splitter cells, border cells
* Mirror neurons
* Reward neurons
* Conflict cells

(continued)

www.biorxiv.org

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Joel Mainland @jmainland.bsky.social · Nov 23

Hi Monica,
Could you please add me to the feed? I am an olfactory neuroscientist.
Here is my staff page: monell.org/joel-mainland/ and Scholar profile scholar.google.com/citations?us... Thank you!

Joel D. Mainland - Monell Chemical Senses Center

Joel Mainland's research goal is to develop a predictive model relating molecular structure and olfactory perception.

monell.org

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

Matthew Cobb @matthewcobb.bsky.social · Nov 13

New paper in Nature showing how smell works in humans - no quantum woo involved, surprise surprise. Terrific stuff from Claire de March, Hiro Matsunami and others. Summarised here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Engineered receptors show how humans tell countless odour molecules apart

The structures of engineered odorant receptors.

www.nature.com

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Reposted by Joel Mainland

kevinbolding.bsky.social @kevinbolding.bsky.social · Apr 26

My lab is looking for a postdoc to record lots of neurons while mice sniff each other. Basically I think that will tell us something more interesting about sensory processing than blasting pineapple smell into their noses. You don’t have to be an olfactionist to apply.

apply.interfolio.com/139308

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