Google AI Creates a Smell Map: Scientists Use 5,000 Molecules and a Neural Network

Google AI has developed an artificial intelligence model that matches the structure of molecules with their smell.

This will reportedly aid in the development of certain food tastes or the discovery of compounds that repel disease-causing organisms.

Representatives of Google AI also spoke about the project in social networks.

Today we are introducing touch map,created using machine learning. It links thousands of molecules and their perceived odors, allowing the prediction of odors from invisible molecules and providing a potential tool for solving global health problems such as insect-borne diseases.

The most famous examples of these cards are associated withcolor vision, including the color wheel, and more complex options used to capture color in video, according to Google AI in a press release. There are over 300 olfactory receptors, as opposed to the human eye's three color sensors (red, green, and blue). Therefore, it is very difficult to create a smell map.

In 2019, Google's artificial intelligencedeveloped a graph neural network (GNN) model. To recap, this is a type of neural network that works directly with the structure of a graph. A typical application of GNN is node classification.

Now the Google AI network has begun to explore thousands ofexamples of various molecules combined with odor names such as "meaty", "floral" or "minty". The goal is to learn how to look for the relationship between the structure of a molecule and the likelihood that it will have a special smell label.

As a result, engineers create a map thatrelates the structure of a molecule to the odor it emits. The neural network also measures how close the molecules are to each other in terms of smell. In total, the scientists used more than 5,000 molecules from two different taste and odor data sets.

In addition, in a separate study by colleaguesMainland used a neural network to create a map linking the molecular structures of compounds that repel mosquitoes to how repellent insects perceive smells to be.

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Cover photo: CC0 Public domain