Great news for the DoOR project, the paper on our comprehensive update of the Database of Odorant Responses was published in Scientific Reports a few days ago [¹]. With the paper being published I also finally set the versions of DoOR.functions and DoOR.data 2.0 and created releases on GitHub and Zenodo. The updated web page for quick queries is available at http://neuro.uni.kn.

The database now holds responses for 7381 different odorant-receptor combinations. In total we added 15 new data sets from 11 studies adding 467 new odorants summing up to a total of 2894 new responses to DoOR. The Raw data used for calculating the consensus database consists of 11337 individual data points. Running the merging process (i.e. trying all 7,714,976 possible combinations of pairwise study merges; see paper for details) with 100 jobs in parallel on a cluster took more than a week.

Checkout the new documentation (R vignettes) to find out about the new functions, tools and visualizations DoOR offers. For example, I wrote a little sensillum identification tool which will hopefully be helpful for people performing single sensillum recordings (identifySensillum()). With dplot_ALmap() you can now quickly produce antennal lobe activity maps for your odorant of interest, visualized with Veith Grabe’s beautiful in vivo AL map.

The project web page got a complete facelift, tables can now be sorted by clicking the headers and we link to several additional external sources ChEBI, ChemSpider and the Virtual Fly Brain.

So if your work is somehow related to olfaction, if you are a physiologist or need data for modeling, checkout DoOR and tell me what you think!

References