Editing Olfactory receptor neuron (section)

===Number of distinguishable odors===
A widely publicized study suggested that humans can detect more than one trillion different odors.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1126/science.1249168 |pmid=24653035 |title=Humans Can Discriminate More than 1 Trillion Olfactory Stimuli |journal=Science |volume=343 |issue=6177 |year=2014 |last1=Bushdid |first1=C. |last2=Magnasco |first2=M. O. |last3=Vosshall |first3=L. B. |last4=Keller |first4=A. |bibcode=2014Sci...343.1370B |pages=1370–2 |pmc=4483192}}</ref> This finding has been disputed. Critics argued that the methodology used for the estimation was fundamentally flawed, showing that applying the same argument for better-understood sensory modalities, such as vision or audition, leads to wrong conclusions.<ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.7554/eLife.07865|pmid=26151672|pmc=4491593|title=On the dimensionality of odor space|last1=Meister|first1=Markus|volume=4|pages=e07865|journal=eLife|year=2015 |doi-access=free }}</ref> Other researchers have also showed that the result is extremely sensitive to the precise details of the calculation, with small variations changing the result over dozens of orders of magnitude, possibly going as low as a few thousand.<ref>{{cite journal|doi=10.7554/eLife.08127|pmid=26151673|pmc=4491703|title=The number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is still unknown|first1=Richard C.|last1=Gerkin|first2=Jason B.|last2=Castro|volume=4|pages=e08127|journal=eLife|year=2015 |doi-access=free }}</ref> The authors of the original study have argued that their estimate holds as long as it is assumed that odor space is sufficiently high-dimensional.<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.1101/022103|title=On the dimensionality of olfactory space|year=2015|last1=Magnasco|first1=Marcelo O.|last2=Keller|first2=Andreas|last3=Vosshall|first3=Leslie B.|doi-access=free}}</ref>