Why can you smell a molecule you have never encountered before, and how does the nose use antagonism, binding proteins, and chemotopic maps to decode the chemical world? Tim Pearce explores the engineering principles behind biological olfaction.

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Tim Pearce provides a comprehensive tour of natural olfaction, from the molecular interactions at the receptor sheet to the computational principles that enable detection of thousands of diverse chemical compounds. He highlights the system's remarkable foreignness property: unlike vision with its handful of receptor types, olfaction deploys over one percent of the genome to create a broad, relatively unbiased sampling of chemical space, capable of responding to novel molecules never previously encountered by the species.