10.Stoneham says that when he first heard about Turin's idea, while Turin was himself based at UCL, "I didn't believe it".But, he adds, "because it was an interesting idea, I thought I should prove it couldn't work.I did some simple calculations, and only then began to feel Luca could be right." Now Stoneham and his co-workers have done the job more thoroughly, in a paper soon to be published in Physical Review Letters.
11.The UCL team calculated the rates of electron hopping in a nose receptor that has an odorant molecule bound to it.This rate depends on various properties of the biomolecular system that are not known, but the researchers could estimate these parameters based on typical values for molecules of this sort.
12.The key issue is whether the hopping rate with the odorant in place is significantly greater than that without it.The calculations show that it is — which means that odour identification in this way seems theoretically possible.
13.But Horsfield stresses that that's different from a proof of Turin's idea."So far things look plausible, but we need proper experimental verification.We're beginning to think about what experiments could be performed."
14.Meanwhile, Turin is pressing ahead with his hypothesis."At Flexitral we have been designing odorants exclusively on the basis of their computed vibrations," he says."Our success rate at odorant discovery is two orders of magnitude better than the competition." At the very least, he is putting his money where his nose is.
