A Model for Chemosensory Reception

A new model for chemosensory reception is presented. It models reactions between odor molecules and receptor proteins and the activation of second messenger by receptor proteins. The mathematical formulation of the reaction kinetics is transformed into an artificial neural network (ANN). The resulting feed-forward network provides a powerful means for parameter fitting by applying learning algorithms. The weights of the network corresponding to chemical parameters can be trained by presenting experimental data. We demonstrate the simulation capabilities of the model with experimental data from honey bee chemosensory neurons. It can be shown that our model is sufficient to rebuild the observed data and that simpler models are not able to do this task. 1 INTRODUCTION Terrestrial animals, vertebrates and invertebrates, have developed very similar solutions for the problem of recognizing volatile substances [Vogt et al., 1989]. Odor molecules bind to receptor proteins (receptor sites) at ..