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Mobile. Inorganic chemists know as a rule of thumb that if a volatile compound is a good ligand for metal ion coordination complexes, it probably smells strongly; this observation has lead to recent advances in artificial olfaction ( 1 ). The only notable exceptions to this rule are CO and NO, which are produced endogenously as neural messengers ( 2 ) and, therefore, elicit no olfactory response. In general, the human olfactory system is extremely sensitive to amines and thiols (good ligands for metal ions) but not to alcohols (which are only weak ligands; ref. 3 ), as shown in Fig. 1 . Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future.
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