Odor interaction between Bourgeonal and its antagonist undecanal

The perceived quality of a binary mixture will, as a rule of thumb, be dominated by the quality of the stronger unmixed component. On the other hand, there are mechanisms that, in theory, suggest that this will not always be true; one example being receptor antagonism. Undecanal has been indicated as an antagonist for bourgeonal-sensitive receptors in the human olfactory epithelium. Therefore, we investigated mixtures of isointense concentrations of bourgeonal and undecanal and, as a control, mixtures of isointense concentrations of bourgeonal and n-butanol. Both mixture types were investigated at 2 levels of concentration. The particular aim was to see if the bourgeonal-undecanal mixtures would exhibit asymmetric odor quality favoring the perception of the antagonist and the control mixture would not. For the control mixture, indeed odor quality tended to be dominated by the strongest component before mixing as would be suggested from previous studies. In line with the hypothesis, the bourgeonal-undecanal mixture was dominated by the antagonist's quality, but only when mixed at higher concentrations, altogether suggesting the effects of a low-affinity receptor antagonism. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of how antagonistic interaction at the level of the receptor can affect the perception of odor mixtures in humans.