Chemical characterization of body-odors

BACKGROUND: Human body emits thousands of different small molecules that in part constitute our body odour. Understanding the human body odour in its complexity is thus a technically challenging task that requires powerful techniques of chemical analysis in terms of detection limits and separation power.

METHODS: To this goal we use modern instruments of comprehensive two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometric detection. Another technical challenge is how to achieve reliable sampling of human body odour from the donors. For this purpose, we use solid sampling on cotton pads, from which the analytes are desorbed using a thermal desorption unit at temperatures nearing those of the human body so as to mimic the best the condition of body odour emissions by living humans. Last but not least, the questions we try to answer within SMELLODI require a reliable comparison among multiple chromatograms obtained from multiple donors. For this purpose, we developed a semi-automated alignment and peak filtering algorithm allowing such comparisons while avoiding laborious manual curation of the data. We believe that our techniques will provide valuable input for multiple SMELLODI work packages.