Fragrance Science Alliance > 32nd Annual AChemS Meeting Highlights

by Craig Warren, PhD
Scientific Affairs Director, Sense of Smell Institute

The Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS) held its 32nd Annual Meeting in St. Pete Beach, Florida on April 21-25, 2010, attracting approximately 600 registrants and more than 400 abstracts. In addition to poster and platform presentations, the program offered symposia, special lectures, and various National Institutes of Health sponsored workshops.

This year’s conference offered a mix of both basic and applied research in the chemical senses including central and peripheral processing of gustatory, olfactory, pheromonal, and common chemical stimuli, such as irritants. Attendees included basic and clinical research scientists, scientists from the flavor and fragrance industry and students. The program for the meeting and the abstracts for the poster and platform presentations can be found on the AChemS website.

Industry Participation
Fragrance industry participation at this meeting is slowly growing; however, the majority of attendees are still mainly academic researchers and their students. Corporate sponsors included Givaudan, IFF, Firmenich, Pepsi, Ajinomoto and Kao. Dr. Robert Weinberg of MIT delivered this year's Givaudan lecture which traditionally covers a topic outside the fields of taste and smell. This year was no exception in that Dr. Weinberg and his group have made numerous fundamental discoveries about the molecular mechanisms underlying cancer. His talk was entitled: "Normal and Cancer Stem Cells and the Development of Malignancy".

IFF sponsored both a symposium entitled: "Genetics of Human Olfaction", and the IFF Lecture entitled: "Mammalian Taste" which was delivered by Dr. Charles Zuker of Columbia University. The Industry Symposium, which is supported by industry sponsorship, presented six lectures and a roundtable discussion that highlighted the current hot areas in taste and smell research. It was here that Dr. Don Wilson of New York University presented a paper entitled: "Recent Advances in Understanding Olfactory Perceptual Mechanisms" that reviewed the role of experience, context and expectation in odor perception. This area of research is now being actively pursued by the fragrance industry because the brain imaging techniques developed in the academic laboratories can be used to measure the effect of advertising, expectation and experience on a consumer’s perception of fragrance.

While the active participation by the industrial researchers at this meeting is still small, only five of the 361 posters presented at the meeting had industrial authorship, the number of attendees from industry was considerably larger than in previous years.

Symposia
We were lucky to have six excellent symposiums this year in that they covered areas that were of interest to most people at the meeting. The scope of these symposiums is too large to cover in this review; however, a somewhat detailed review of the AChemS meeting will be published towards the end of the year in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. In the meantime I would encourage everybody who is interested in learning more about a particular symposium to check out the abstracts that can be obtained online from the AChemS website.

"Genetics of Human Olfaction" The contribution of genetic effects to human olfactory perception in humans is largely unknown. This symposium explored the nature of differences in human olfactory perception and their associations with underlying genotypes.

"Cilia, Sensory Dysfunction and Disease" The panel presentation featured talks from several investigators both within and outside the olfactory field whose work combines clinical studies with basic science research to investigate the mechanisms of cilia dysfunction to provide new information regarding pathogenesis of diseases of human sensory perception.

"Sensory Integration and Competition" This discussion touched on neural mechanisms of olfactory-auditory integration in mice, neural mechanisms of olfactory, gustatory, visual, and auditory integration in humans, neural mechanisms for the resolution of conflicts between different sensory modalities, binaural rivalry, and the neuroanatomical integration of olfactory information between the hemispheres.

"Chemoreception in Context: Interactions with Endocrine Systems and Metabolic State" Recently published work and emerging research efforts suggest that olfactory and taste systems are intimately linked with endocrine systems that regulate or modify energy balance. Participants in this symposium addressed the current knowledge of hormonal modulation of chemosensory perception and how disruption of hormonal signaling in the olfactory or taste systems can impact energy homeostasis or nutrient utilization.

"Wiring the Olfactory Systems" The detection of the odorant signals from the environment relies on the formation of accurate stereotypical connections between olfactory sensory neurons located in the olfactory epithelium and second order neurons located in the olfactory bulb. This symposium examined recent progress in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms that underlie the formation of an accurate glomerular map.

"Transient Dynamics, Metastable States and Temporal Coding in Chemosensory Processing" Our understanding of how neural networks in the brain process chemosensory information is poorly understood. This symposium brought together theoreticians and experimentalists who studied networks with the explicit goal of comparing how one or another type of model may apply to different animals and chemosensory systems in the brain.

Posters
Over 350 poster presentations on virtually every aspect of the chemosensory sciences were featured. Out of these I have selected a small subset that I think will be of immediate interest to the fragrance industry. Once again, anyone interested in learning more about a particular poster should download the abstracts from the AChemS website. In most cases the abstracts contain experimental details and conclusions.

Poster P108 Researchers from Firmenich and coworkers from three different universities reported the expansion of the Geneva Emotion and Odor Scale (GEOS) to include subject populations in Liverpool, England and Singapore. This allowed them to compare the emotional response of subjects to various odors in Switzerland, England and Singapore. The study showed that some emotional dimensions were invariant between the three countries (Sensuality, /Desire, Disgust, Energy, and Happiness/Well-being) while others such as a Spirituality dimension were not.

Poster P114 Dr. Rachel Herz working in collaboration with coworkers from the Perfumery Development Research Labs of Kao Corp. in Tokyo and the Kao Brands Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, studied the relationship between positive odor-evoked memories and product evaluation. Results using a skin lotion as the test product showed that if its odor evoked an emotional memory the lotion was rated higher on more measures than if the odor was non-evocative.

Poster P120 Drs. Anat Arzi and Noam Sobel of the Weitzman Institute found that brief repetitive exposures to odor can increase a subject's sensitivity to that odor. Using citral (lemon odor) in mineral oil as the odorant the researchers found that sniffing this odor for three continuous minutes every 15 minutes for 20 times significantly increased the subject’s sensitivity to citral. This effect, however, was short lived because it was found that the subject’s sensitivity returned to baseline the next day.

Poster P122 Dr. Charles Wysocki of Monell Chemical Senses Center working in collaboration with researchers from Takasago reported that there may be far more specific anosmias than previously reported. Their study included four common malodors: geosmin (mold), skatole (fecal), 3-hydroxy-3-methyl hexanoic acid (underarm) and 2- nonenal (scalp odor).

Poster P190 Dr. Beverly Tepper of Rutgers University working in collaboration with coworkers from Takasago studied the individual differences in the perception of cooling ingredients. The study involved common physiological cooling agents such as menthyl succinate, menthyl glutarate, menthyl lactate, along with several proprietary cooling agents and blends of cooling agents. The study showed that East Asians perceive some cooling ingredients differently than do Caucasians and that this might be related to different cultural experiences and use patterns for products with cooling ingredients.

Poster P311 Titled "Human Male Superiority in Olfactory Sensitivity to the Sperm-Attractant Odorant Bourgeonal," this poster drew a lot of observers. The poster was by Peter Olsson and Matthias Laska of Linkoping University in Sweden. Bourgeonal is a muguet smelling aroma chemical that was initially developed by Quest international. Human sperm cells contain olfactory receptors that are activated by bourgeonal. That is, they swim towards this aromatic aldehyde. Olsson and Laska found that human males are more sensitive to bourgeonal than are females, which to their knowledge is the first study ever to find a human male superiority in olfactory sensitivity.

Poster P328 In a clinical study entitled: "The Scent of Nurturing: Experimental Evidence Supporting the Priming of Infant Nurturing Behavior by Baby Powder Fragrance", Monique Smeets and coworkers at Utrecht University in the Netherlands tested whether the smell of baby powder can provoke tender feelings in parents reminding them of when their children were small. They found that parents previously primed to the baby powder smell exhibited a higher level of nurturing behavior when responding to the needs of a crying, computerized RealCare® infant simulator doll in a room that had a low background level of baby powder odor. A lower level of nurturing behavior was observed when the background odor was not baby powder odor.

Conclusion
In addition to providing the current state-of-the-art in the area of taste and smell, AChemS provides an indication of the research directions that industry will be following about 10 years from now. For example, the elucidation of the genes that code for olfactory receptors by Axel and Buck in 1994 led to the elucidation of the genes that code for the taste receptors in 2000 by Dr. Charles Zuker. In January of 2008, Firmenich signed a collaborative agreement with Senomyx to develop their cool receptor technology into novel cooling flavor ingredients. In August 2009, Firmenich signed another collaborative agreement with Senomyx to develop and commercialize its flavor enhancers for sucrose, fructose and stevia. In July of this year, IFF entered into a licensing and commercialization agreement with Redpoint Bio Corporation to commercialize its all-natural sweetness enhancer. Thus, the taste receptor work shown at AChemS approximate 10 years ago has now found its way into commercial development. Unfortunately, the olfactory receptor work that has been ongoing for the past 15 years has not found its way into commercial development. This is because no one has figured out how to convert what is known about odor receptors into a screening procedure for odorants.

This year's AChemS meeting presented a wealth of information on the genetics of olfaction, molecular mechanisms of transduction, stimulus-receptor interactions, and central processing of taste and smell signals. Many presentations emphasized the growing importance of the use of brain imaging techniques in understanding how the brain processes the signals coming from taste and smell receptors. Ten years from today some of this work will find its way into a commercial application. I am keeping my eye on two areas: the use of olfactory receptors to determine how one odorant modulates the perception of another, and the use of brain imaging techniques to optimize an advertisement for a perfume or fragranced product. We will revisit these areas next year after AChemS XXXIII.