Monoosmatic components required

The next question arising is that about the minimum mmber of monoosmatic components required to encode an odor quality. It has been recognized by BEETS that an inherent "Principle of informational complexity" makes the perception of even a single odorant molecular species informationally complex, even if the odor information pattern is dominated by the terminal derivative (monoosmatic component) of a single chemoreceptory modality. But there has to be something like a minimum complexity still. In terms of the EMO there must be a minimum number of monoosmatic components essential to produce a minimal odor information pattern. Again, since this problem is not in the domain of peripheral processes, the Enzyme Model of Olfaction cannot provide an answer. However, experimental results obtained by POLAK (m) indicate that one... 

As a consequence the minimvun number of monoosmatic components required to encode an odor quality is two. This seems to rule out the concept of primary odors. However, taking into account the relative intensities of the monoosmatic components one could expect that an odor profile with two monoosmatic components of which one dominates decisively would signal an odor queility approaching the simplicity of a primary odor. 

It has been observed that the discriminatory capabilities of human olfaction are tremendous It was estimated that an untrained person could differentiate up to ten million odors, perhaps even significantly more than that. Information theory then shows that in order to encode the qualities of ten million odors in a simple binary mode (Monoosmatic components on or off, their intensity, albeit important, is in this connection disregarded) only 2h to 27 specific profiles, disregarding possible and probable redundancies, and therefore the same number of complementary receptor sites would be required. Assuming furthermore that said redundancy, in which the informational modalities of two different specific receptor sites of two different olfactory neurons are confluent in one collector cell and therefore contribute to the expression of only one monoosmatic component is indeed operational it becomes necessary to increase the total number of types of specific receptor sites to 2k-30. This means that only 2U-30 specific detector proteins are required for structure recognition in the transduction process. This compares to about UOOO enzyme systems in different stages of activity estimated to be present in a cell any time. 

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