Comparing the information content of two large olfactory databases.

The expert's subjectivity in establishing an olfactory description can produce wide discrepancies in different databases listing the odor profile of identical compounds. A representative example is obtained by comparing the odorous compounds included in the "Perfumery Materials and Performance 2001" (PMP2001) database and in Arctander's books (1960 and 1969). To better assess this problem, classification models obtained by using the adaptive fuzzy partition method were established on subsets of these databases distributed into the same olfactory classes. The robustness and the prediction power of these models give a powerful criterion for evaluating the "quality" of their information content and for deciding which is the most trustable database.

[Odor intensity of binary mixtures of odorous compounds]. / L'intensité de l'odeur des mélanges binaires de composés odorants.

This paper presents the MBO model for the perceived intensity of odour mixtures. This model is based on an equation previously reported by our team, intended to model the whole stimulus-response intensity curve of pure odorous compounds. The MBO model was applied to a set of published data, and compared to other published models. The results show a high modelling efficiency of the MBO model compared to other proposed equations, especially for binary mixtures exhibiting significant asymmetry of intensity for different ratios of the two components. Furthermore, the MBO model includes parameters specific to the respective effects of each component in the mixture, which may help to clarify the masking and synergy effects that are often sought in odour mixtures.