Interpretations of key food odorant dose-olfactory response curves using statistical physics method

In this work, statistical physics treatment has been employed to understand the olfaction mechanism through the study of the dose-olfactory response of putative adsorption process of key food odorants onto the human olfactory receptor OR2W1. This is in order to obtain new steric and energetic characterizations at the molecular level of this chemical sense system. Three models have been proposed: a monolayer, a double layer and a three layers model. The monolayer model with identical and independent receptor sites has been chosen as an appropriate one to present a good correlation with the experimental dose-response curves. Indeed, the numerical values of the three fitted parameters (RM, n, C1/2) are used to characterize the size of the human olfactory receptor binding sites and the interactions between eight key food odorants i.e., (R)-(−)-carvone, (S)-(−)-limonene, (R)-(+)-limonene, 2-phenylethanthiol, 3-mercaptohexyl acetate, methyl cinnamate, cinnamyl acetate and 2-phenylethyl acetate and OR2W1 through the receptor site size distribution (RSD) and to determine an olfactory band of these odorants through the determination of the adsorption energy values and the adsorption energy distributions (AEDs). •Key food odorant dose-response curves were fitted by astatistical physics model.•Steric and energetic interpretations were derived from olfactory response curves.•Calculation with statistical physics model was used to determine the RSDs and AEDs.•Determination of olfaction band of eight key food eight key food odorants.