Sniffing out that one in a quadrillion. Not your grandmother's compatibility testing

Can we sniff out cues of a conspecific's age or enhance their youthful appeal with human pheromones?

Sorry, this really has nothing to do with compatibility testing and mate choice. It may make the level of examination required a bit more clear, however, when it comes to mate choice for genetic diversity based on human scent signatures.

Hey this sounds like it could be pressed into service for a pheromone detector as well maybe? Of course the light absorption probably won't reveal the molecular structure of a particular steraloid - more on a wavelength detection like cosmologists do with distant stars and nebulae to determine their atomic component ratios, but interesting nonetheless! Thanks James!

(12-12-2011 10:48 PM)2Soon2Care Wrote:  Hey this sounds like it could be pressed into service for a pheromone detector as well maybe? Of course the light absorption probably won't reveal the molecular structure of a particular steraloid - more on a wavelength detection like cosmologists do with distant stars and nebulae to determine their atomic component ratios, but interesting nonetheless! Thanks James!

I think the technology could be applied to distinguish the number of different molecules and their relative salience to specific scent signatures. And since we already know some of the most likely molecules there might be a way to standardize the process of detection. I vaguely recall something about one molecule of musk being detectable in one billion parts of air, so at least we might be getting closer to the capabilities of the human nose.

(12-12-2011 11:16 PM)jvkohl Wrote:  I vaguely recall something about one molecule of musk being detectable in one billion parts of air, so at least we might be getting closer to the capabilities of the human nose.

I remember reading years ago that the Human nose can detect Geosmin at 5 parts per trillion... I found that to be pretty fascinating...

The truffle-sniffing artificial noses are probably the closest to a pheromone detector, but if I remember right they worked similarly to monoclonal antibodies, have an extremely high specificity for a matching molecule. Modeling the behavior of the human sniffer would be a lot of biological work dissecting and mapping the different sensory organs themselves to figure out what nerve pathways are being fired for some molecules, and I bet anything they are doing more like releasing other chemical signals other than just nervous activation (hormones I guess since they would act over a distance). The molecular matching cellular machinery would be the troubling bits since each individual probably has more or less evolved and differentiated sensory structures and more or less active chemical pathways. Thinking it through, that would most likely be a specific branch of research in and of itself that is already ongoing. Cutting past the biological model to a purely technological model that could detect specific molecules would probably take far less time, since a lot of good work already exists in the molecular modeling in 3-D and some of the protein-folding systems can even determine a complimentary structure that would be activated like a sensor. Interesting. This needs more research, it may be doable, maybe not with the laser-based approach but from a purely biochemical approach. More reading for me!

Thanks guys, you've put me onto another thing I am interested in! (my first career was genetic engineering)