The sense of smell is highly important to survival in many animals. Changes in odorous environmental conditions cause most species (ranging from lower invertebrates to mammals) to demonstrate highly adaptive behavioral performances. Natural chemical signals such as food scents or pheromones are particularly unstable and fluctuate in quality, space, and time. Despite this, behavioral responses related to biologically meaningful odor signals can be observed even in complex natural odorous environments where backgrounds may vary enormously, demonstrating that the underlying olfactory neural network is a very dynamic pattern recognition device. We have made significant progress in understanding olfactory receptor transduction mechanisms in biological systems. The chain of events linking the presence of odorant molecules in the air (input) to the generation of a neural spike train (output) has been …