If Odor Is Lock-and-Key, What Happens When You Change All the Locks?
Material below summarizes the article Vibrational Detection of Odorant Functional Groups by Drosophila Melanogaster, published on October 26, 2017, in eNeuro and authored by Klio Maniati, Katherine-Joanne Haralambous, Luca Turin, and Efthimios M.C. Skoulakis.
We are interested in tests that could help decide between the vibrational theory of odor and the lock-and-key theory, a controversial question in the field of olfaction. Is odor character of a molecule determined by its shape or its vibrations?
In a shape theory, the smell of an odorant is encoded in the shape of the odorant molecule, which in turn determines the receptors in which it fits. This is a lock-and-key theory: the shapes of both locks and keys matter to the pattern of receptor activation.
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