In modern human society, odor detection tasks are becoming more and more prominent, e.g. to prevent terrorism or for drug searches, and especially the use of rodents for these tasks has some unique advantages. Researchers from the Kunming Institute of Zoology developed a novel apparatus and operant conditioning paradigm (Relative GO NO-GO) for mouse-based odor detection systems. Using this system, after a short period of simultaneous training,　groups of 5 mice working together were able to detect unpredictable target odor cues, set off an alarm within seconds and with an accuracy rate of 98%. Compared to other existing odor detection systems, this device has several advantages: high degree of automatic detection, short training period, high training success rate and it only uses a moderate number of animals, which leads to an easy application. The innovation compared to existing methods, is that the target odors used to train the animals appeared passively and at any time (in existing methods the animal actively triggers the release of odor targets). This is a important novelty for application-oriented systems, because in real-life odor targets are also unpredictable. Furthermore, the new paradigm allows　to measure real-time reliability of individual animals. In three experiments, the researchers examined the detection rate of the mice under different conditions, and results indicate that the new method leads to a stable and reliable performance. Overall this new approach is promising for further development in respect to various types of application-orientated odor detection systems.

　　(by Rebekka Kesberg)