Terry Acree`s laboratory is interested in how stimulant composition is represented in perception. A seemingly infinite number of perceptions are invoked by less than 1000 odorants found in the human sensory environment. Mediated by sensory neurons expressing a given receptor these odorants generate neural excitation in the brain that is a topographic map of sensory information. Recent literature suggest that olfactory receptor expression is highly variant in the human population and that this may explain the functional variation in taste and olfaction that has been observed for decades. Understanding the relationship between stimulant composition and perception is therefore central to understanding the representation of chemical information in the brain and the impact of genetic diversity on the perception of food.