Let’s Go to a Conference!

How to navigate five days of smell and taste science in Iceland

A scientific conference offers a buffet of presentations ranging from the technical to the arcane. There is always more on offer than one person can consume, so you need a selection strategy. And that strategy depends on the stage of your career. The starry-eyed graduate student goes to talks close to his interests to check out the competition. The early career scientist attends talks by the people who might be reviewing his grant application or tenure decision. An established researcher can afford to be picky—he only bothers with talks that pique his jaded interest or are given by people he knows to be reliably interesting. This approach leaves more time for socializing which, if we’re being honest, is the most enjoyable and often the most informative part of attending a conference. It’s my preferred strategy.

So how does it work? I’ll show you! Here’s my technique for gutting, skinning, and fileting a conference program.

The exhibit specimen is the upcoming 19th International Symposium on Olfaction and Taste. The ISOT meeting happens every four years as a joint effort of the big three smell and taste research societies: AChemS, ECRO, and JASTS. This year’s will be held in Reykjavik, Iceland on June 22 to 26, 2024. Grab yourself a PDF of the program and play along!

We’ll skip Saturday’s preliminary satellite meeting because it’s depressing—various topics in olfactory dysfunction including the tirelessly promoted theme of COVID after-effects. (Sorry, but COVID effects on smell are not different in kind from those of “regular” flu.)

The keynote speaker who opens the big show is Kári Stefánsson of deCODE genetics, the Icelandic company that’s exploited explored the country’s not-at-all creepy national genomic database. I’d go because everyone else will be there. But I wonder what smell or taste topics he will cover since, to my knowledge, the country’s genomics project has contributed relatively little to our knowledge of olfaction.

Things get serious on Sunday when my pal Leslie Vosshall gives a talk on “The unbreakable attraction of mosquitoes to humans.” I’m not into bug olfaction, but Leslie gives a good talk.

The subsequent session on vertebrate bitter receptors may or may not be to your taste (DYSWIDT?), but Darren Logan’s talk on the domestic dog might be interesting if he addresses co-evolutionary convergence between dogs and humans.

The session on Sensory science for human health looks skipabble. Go have lunch. Then, because I like the behavioral aspects of smell, I’d go to the session on Active sensing in a dynamic olfactory world.

Tobias Ackels (University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany), Mice can discriminate odour source distance using plume temporal dynamics.

Alyson Brokaw (Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA), Ecology and plasticity in the olfactory search behaviors of mammals.

Thierry Emonet (Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA), Odor motion detection enhances navigation of turbulent odor plumes.

Brian H. Smith (Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA), Active sensing of odors through antennal “sniffing” movements in the honey bee (Apis mellifera).

Aaron True (University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA), Odor mixing, dispersion, and sampling in olfactory landscape.

A lot of research on functional brain-wiring is no doubt good science, but it’s early days and there aren’t many larger scale hypotheses to give the non-specialist some frame of reference. So for example, I’d glide past Oral Session A [Phrasing!] and presentations such as these:

Diego E. Hernandez Trejo (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA), Fast updating feedback from the piriform cortex to the olfactory bulb relays multimodal identity and reward contingency signals during rule-reversal.

Christian Lohr (University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany), Cell type-specific bidirectional neuron-astrocyte communication contributes to information processing in the mouse olfactory bulb.

Sunday afternoon is more bugs, olfactory neurogenesis, and taste cells. Time to hit the sauna or whatever one does for R&R in Iceland.

Monday morning I’d hit Hiroaki Matsunami’s (Duke University, Durham, NC, USA) talk “Deciphering odor recognition: structural studies of G-protein coupled odorant receptors” because Hiro is really smart and creative and does interesting work.

After that come more sessions on models (almost always useless) and bugs (again), followed by one on computational biology (i.e., more models). Skip, skip, skip.

The limbic system—esp. the specialized brain circuits dealing with emotion—is always a hot topic, but I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the “Odor representations in the limbic system” sessions will put the audience to sleep. I’m not saying Jay Gottfried gives the most dense, impenetrable talks in the world, but if the jet lag is catching up to you at this point my advice is to skip the session and find the espresso bar.

“Oral Session D” [c’mon people, this sounds like a porno or an appointment with the endodontist] has naked mole rats! Never miss a naked mole rat talk. It’s one of the top three most bizarre rodent species.

Mohammed Khallaf (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany), An olfactory social language in the naked mole-rat?

Things get juicier on Tuesday morning.

Jessica Freiherr (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany), Subjective perception of positive and negative emotional body odors and common odors in autism-spectrum disorders.

I’ve always wondered how Milton down in Storage B felt about BO. Plus, I would like to find out what “empathy related” BO is.

Sarah Wehner (Heinrich-Heine-University, Duesseldorf, Germany), Empathy related body odours shape social perception.

The session organized by Ilona Croy (You stink - deciphering olfactory communication in humans) sounds good, especially these two:

Natan Horáček (IOCB Prague, Prague, Czech Republic), Chemistry of human body odor: individuality vs. conserved signatures of psychophysiological states.

Laura Schäfer (Universitätsklinikum Carl Gustav Carus, Dresden, Germany), Olfactory cuteness – neural and perceptual hints towards an olfactory Kindchenschema.

After this comes more fruit flies (hard pass), then a session on Chemosensory space organized by the always reliable Thomas Hummel (Technical University of Dresden, Dresden, Germany). The presentations sound intriguing but “mapping” and “machine learning” are code words for modeling/onanism. Still, I’d hang in because any talk by Noam Sobel is worth hearing.

Antonie Bierling (University of Jena, Jena, Germany), From molecule to perception: development of a chemical-perceptual space of olfaction (CROWN).

Emily Mayhew (Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA), Mapping the boundaries and terrains of olfactory space.

Masha Niv (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel), Machine learning for bitter taste: data, surprises and new tools.

Noam Sobel (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel), Predicting perceptual similarity from physicochemical properties: the path to digitizing smell.

Session 33. Aquatic olfaction—time for brunch.

The afternoon kicks off with a session on “pheromones,” but it’s bug pheromones, so nah. A sesh on food taste, liking, and food intake . . . sorry, nodded off there for a moment. Next!

Oral Session F is a grab bag, including human female tears, consciousness, body odors, and “male body-odor associated with unexplained recurrent pregnancy loss.” The last one sounds interesting, but only if it’s not time for a siesta.

Bold prediction: Tuesday afternoon’s Odors, sensors, perception: convergence with AI will be as useless as everything to date having to do with odor and AI. Drinks on the patio with old acquaintances a much better bet.

Wednesday: Working memory in the chemical senses might be interesting an interesting session because one of the organizers is the thoughtful Theresa White.

And then ISOT 2024 ends with a whimper—another bug session.

Shed a tear for Chen-Zhu Wang (Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China) because there will only be a handful of people left to listen to “Gustatory coding of feeding sugars in the polyphagous agricultural pest, Helicoverpa armigera.”

And THAT, dear readers, is how to do a scientific meeting in Iceland.