'It was a molecule that nobody had ever seen before,' says Wiltschko, who runs a company called Osmo, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His team created the compound, called 533, as part of its mission to understand and digitize smell. His goal ' to develop a system that can detect, predict or create odours ' is a tall order, as molecule 533 shows. 'If you looked at the structure, you would never have guessed that it smelled this way.' That's one of the problems with understanding smell: the chemical structure of a molecule tells you almost nothing about its odour. Two chemicals with very similar structures can smell wildly different; and two wildly different chemical structures can produce an almost identical odour. And most smells ' coffee, Camembert, ripe tomatoes ' are mixtures of many tens or hundreds of aroma molecules, intensifying the challenge of understanding how chemistry gives rise to olfactory experience. Another problem is working out how smells relate to each other....
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