Advanced investigation of the olfactory perception of semiochemical TMT on OR5K1 and Olfr175 by statistical physics approach.

The adsorption of the trimethylthiazoline (TMT) on the human olfactory receptor OR5K1 and the mouse olfactory receptor Olfr175 was the object of the present paper. The main contribution of this work was to characterize stereographically and energetically OR5K1 and Olfr175 activated by trimethylthiazoline molecules docked on the human and the mouse olfactory binding pockets using the grand canonical ensemble in statistical physics. The experimental data and the advanced statistical physics models revealed that the adsorption of the trimethylthiazoline on the human olfactory receptor OR5K1 can be interpreted using the monolayer model with single energy, while the monolayer model with two energies described the interaction between the trimethylthiazoline molecules and the mouse olfactory receptor Olfr175. In fact, the investigated odorant was shown to be docked by a multi-docking process and non parallel orientation on OR5K1 and Olfr175 since the values of the number of TMT molecules per binding site n were superior to 1. The proposed models were applied to calculate the human and the mouse olfactory receptor binding site size distributions relative to TMT, which were spread out from 0.30 to 20 nm with a maximum at about 1.75 nm for OR5K1 and from 1 to 25 nm with a peak at about 4.25 nm for Olfr175. Furthermore, it was found from the calculated molar adsorption energies, which were lower than 11 kJ/mol, that physical adsorption process was occurred in the two olfactory systems. The adsorption energy distributions relative to TMT can be also calculated in order to understand of olfaction process in general through the determination of olfactory bands (i. e., adsorption energy distribution bands), which were situated between 0 and 10.50 kJ/mol and between 3 and 12.50 kJ/mol for OR5K1 and Olfr175, respectively. Referring to the investigation of thermodynamic functions governing the adsorption process such as the adsorption entropy, the Gibbs free enthalpy and the internal energy, it may be noted that the disorder peak of the two olfactory systems was reached when the equilibrium concentration was equal to the concentration at half saturation. In addition, the Gibbs free enthalpy and the internal energy were calculated and their negative values indicated that the adsorption process involved in the olfactory mechanism was exothermic and spontaneous nature.