One way to determine these compounds is to look at the genetics, find genes that code for the enzymes which synthesize the compound in other plants and compare them to the genome sequence of the plant of interest.
Far fetched but we are living in the future I bet this would probably work really great with hops since they’re cousins
Any idea if cannabis occurring thiols can break disulfide bonds? Similar to BME or
DTT.
I ordered a bottle of Kevala toasted sesame oil and the package smelled like skunk, like weed skunk, before I even knew what it was. A year later I still have most of it, because it’s very potent, but the skunk smell is gone, only that nutty Chinese smell remains. There’s definitely something weird going on with the product you purchased, the Chinese nutty smell and the skunk smell coming from toasted sesame are two completely different things.
There was a local pizza place that offered sesame seed crust and it put a skunky taste in your mouth, not nutty, not Chinese.
Lots of people mistake the smell of unflushed synthetic fertilizer with “gas”. I’ve went into dispensaries all over the southwest where every strain of flower from the same grower smelled like the same line of fertilizer it was grown with,and asked the budtenders what they smelled. They either said sweet, or gas, every time. To me, and everyone I know, the smell of unflushed synthetic salt weed is unmistakable, like plastic/chemicals,but not in a good way, not from Cannabis metabolites.
Apparently cheap offgassing plastic smells described as either gasoline or sweet to a large portion of the population. I’m still trying to figure out how some people can’t tell the difference between acetone, ketoacidosis and bananas. I don’t believe in the concept of subjectivity, it boils down to qualification IMO.
Terpenes don’t travel, that’s why I wonder why anyone would focus on them when it comes to Cannabis. Everyone wants smells that travel, and terpenes simply do not. So much is attributed to terpenes that has nothing to do with terpene, it’s crazy. It’s not hard to guess that if your coveted cut of Sour Diesel fills the entire house with grapefruit aroma, that it’s probably grapefruit mercaptan, not myrcene and limonene.
Well that’s not completely accurate. I’ve never tasted bitter Cannabis in my life unless it was infused with terpenes extracted from fruit peels. Taste buds are not a myth, no one is salting their French fries to make them smell better. And I can definitely tell if a “lemon” strain is authentic or infused,not always by smell, but always by taste.
Speaking of the flavor categories (add umami and oleogustus to the list), the thing I find missing from synthetic Cannabis concoctions, (aside from imbalanced and unrelated combinations of cannabinoids and terpenoids that render the product medicinally useless) is rather obvious: literally, it’s flavor compounds, such as sugars and acids. It’s really no different than food. Do lemons get their sour flavor from limonene, or organic acids? What about strawberries? (ellagic acid and others) Grapefruit? (Grapefruit mercaptan). What terpene give sugar its flavor, betasugarene? What about salt? Alphasaltanene?
I know the only good blueberry I’ve smoked smelled exactly like “a skunk who lives in a blueberry patch and has eaten nothing but blueberries his entire life” according to everyone who experienced it, and it tasted like gourmet sour blueberry candy fit for a royal brat. Yet Cannabis infused with blueberry terpenes has no flavor, burns your throat, and can only be smelled at point blank. Real blueberries can even pick up soil flavors just like Cannabis (although I’m not quite sure why this happens, any time it happens to my grow the dirt smell cures out to a candy smell and flavor), and when dehydrated will fill the air with the smells. Really don’t
I personally do appreciate the lingering exhale flavor offered up by the sinus after vaporizing some homegrown, but that lip smacking tongue coating sweetness, sourness (or meatyness if your into those strains), is definitely activating taste buds. My mouth goes raw from vaping sour strains all day, just like eating sour straw or sour skittles. Natural concentrate will do it. Perfumed concentrate, the inspiration for my satirical moniker, won’t do it.
Sometimes, well all the time, when vaporizing well cured high Brix organic bud, it even feels like taste buds in the stomach are being woken up,making you feel like you’ve just eaten a tub of gourmet cake frosting. I would have Chrons if it was for that stomach magic of traditional hash. My stomach problems vanished when I started getting it from Spain. These days it’s the vaporizer, I rely on that “sugar” sensations of organically grown resin. It doesn’t come from terpenes, and there’s not enough of it in hydroponic herb.
Too bad these discussions always lead nowhere, due to the fallible impression that terpenes are distinctive of Cannabis. Terpene hype is holding Cannabis back and misdirecting researchers extractors and grower. It’s as bad as Thc/Cbd hype. The most abundant molecules, but far from the most potent. I know the way I grow, sub irrigation with lactic acid teas, is bringing up some other cannabinoids that are more potent than Thc.
What about lactones? Has anyone tested a peaches and cream strain for decalactone? What about amines? Simply because they aren’t terpenes we have to ignore medicinally valuable strains like Cat Piss, Sewer Moss and Space Queen? Why is the common rotting fruit smell attributed to fresh smelling terpenes? Babyshit comes in 3 varieties, fruit milk and carmel, all amazing, yet the closest you’ll find in a store is some nasty bud sprayed with various biofungicides.
I think if clean high Brix organic Cannabis was more commonplace, people would catch on to the truth that terpenes cannot be used to recreate the experiences or the medical properties of authentic Cannabis,and that something called Dogshit can actually tastes like amazing candy. I’m honestly tired of hearing people call bud “skunky” that smells like neem oil and bud rot,but that’s all most people know these days, now that legalization is creepy in, sad.
YES! anytime i go to a dispo they ask “what do YoU WaNnA FeEeL?” I respond “whatchya got that smells like babyshit”.Most budtenders ive came across dont know what to do with that and its sad, like did tehy start smoking weed 2 yrs ago? very difficult to find in PDX dispos thats something Id smoke.
back in 2005 a local NC grower had some stuff that was dangerous to carry. couldnt seal the smell of babyshit, and alot of non-smokin folk who happened upon a wiff didnt believe it was cannabis causing the odor! Have yet to find anything close in a dispo.
The non terpene odorants are definitely present in various degrees and I believe teh quality of the cultivation effort has alot to do with it. seems to me there are compounds with low sensory threshold present in low concentration that distinguish flavors/qualities and are harder to find these days. Then theres some other odorants, maybe heavier weight molecules seem to be present in even brick weed. its that that “whos smokin pot” odor, I notice these come out in oil during decarb and the odor sticks to everything around (if decarbing in open pot)
Surprised no one has done headspace sampling of living plants throughout the growth cycle. (would likely need a dedicated grow tent to get as clean of data as possible since headspace sampling could pick up fragrances from your laundry or anything else floating around the plant being sampled) I’ve built a sampling chamber/system and have a SPME field sampler, its ready to go. Prep’d for a project with a “major terpene retailer” that floundered when they saw the proposal from the analytical lab that did not promise data they could make products / profit from) The NDCA is almost up and I’d love to see this project to fruition. Just gonna take at least 10K in lab work, and getting good data will require some effort in terms of obtaining good data for the lab to get a potentially messy chromatogram.
Ok, Ok, so you are definitely on to some things but tbh you clearly have a lot more research to do to catch up. There have been lab tests on many other compounds in cannabis other then cannabinoids and terpenes. Firstly there are terpenes and terpenoids; monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes/monoterpenoids and sesquiterpenoids (mostly main terpenes/terpenoids youve heard of), diterpenes and diterpenoids (where cannabinoids are derived from as well as salvinorin a, the psychedelic drug in salvia) and triterpenes/triterpenoids (squalene as an example). Within these categories there is a range from acyclic to pentacyclic etc. and on top of all this, the different terpenes and terpenoids can have another functional moiety;
“The monoterpenes present in cannabis plant have another functional moiety like alcohol (fenchyl alcohol, linalool, and borneol), aldehyde (neral), ketone (carvone), ester (bornyl acetate and linalyl acetate), ether (1,8-cineol), and phenol (thymol and carvacrol). The sesquiterpene molecules include structures like alcohols (farnesol) or ketones (nootkatone).” *1
NOW we are on to something! If you research flavour elements related to cannabis you will find much more then a lactone. Known cannabis flavour elements in cannabis definitely include flavonoids (flavones and flavonols/anthoxanthins) which are ketone compounds (many ketones are responsible for some flavour, like raspberry ketones, and there are many forms of ketones).
Other cannabis flavour elements include esters, ethers, aldehydes and alcohols. A particularly known cannabis flavour element is cannaflavin A along with B. These are a type of flavanoid and have known medical effects, as do many of these other flavour elements.
All this said, I implore you to try the experiement instead of quickly dismissing it. Try plugging your nose while you smoke those strains youre describing the flavours of, why not see if it’s actually tickling your taste buds or is just your brain tricking you into thinking the smell is a flavour. Yes, taste buds exist, but mostly as it applies to a visceral experience with liquids and solids, not gasses, though it is possible for gasses to bond to your saliva and to literally taste sweet, sour, salty or bitter. Most cannabis, flavourful or not, will taste nothing but slightly bitter if you smoke it with your nose plugged, from my experience, as you are just tasting what is essentially bong/joint resin sticking to the back of your tongue.
Here’s a couple articles:
A good Blue Cheese should always have that baby poo smell imo haha. I love that strain. TBH at least they are saying that to you and not just asking if yore looking for indica/sativa haha. I worked as a budtender before but my cannabis knowledge was too much for the managers to deal with. customers and owner loved me but managers would get upset when I would question how we do things. I would love to see that project finished. I know some options for places to pitch the idea in canada, but not stateside. good luck!
once I get my files off my hard drive I’ll post a couple articles related to olfaction. This is a hot topic in terms of insect interactions.
Very interesring discussion here.
You mentioned several times that the thiols may carry the terpenes (or other smelly compounds) over. I believe that the thiols (or something else) would rather come first and activate (or inactivate) certain censors, thus notably altering the feeling produced by accompanying or following compounds.
The science behind how we perceive smell is still poorly understood. It seems to be some quantic chemistry, where specific compounds do not even bind to censors, but rather pass close and sort or resonate one way or another according to their shape, promoting changes in the censor without any contact… 
yes, it’s very complicated! I think when it bonds or azeotropes with these other compounds as well, it becomes hard to detect or decipher. Since there are no standards for these compounds, it seems it may be being mistaken for something else or just skipped over. we know surprisingly little about thiols as related to Cannabis, or what it is even that makes the thiol-like smells.
What compounds are you exactly dealing with ?
There are actually standards, or at least concentrates for a large range of product of anykind, more than existing in nature, most of them are synthetic…
If you consider H2S, the odor threshold is about 8-13 ppb…
at 150 ppm you loose sense of smell, the olfactory nerve gets paralyzed.
May be this occur because it gets over-solicited. At a certain threshold, it may just be perfectly exited to receive usually inconspicuous signals, especially from complexe mixes of other compounds…
I was thinking about an indole, called skatole.
The name means like “shit-alcohool”… concentrated enough, we identify it as shit odor. It is basically found in shit. It attracts insect. Diluted, it would have as flagrant floral smell. I was told that it is a secrete ingredient in some known perfumes… Seems to be a great odor enhancer.
Trying to find the info now, I was wondering for an hour why I would find only French pages… until I found out the English name is slightly different (scatol in French):
I was reading that related page then, learning quite some things:
This is also called “sexual odor” in French lol…
They think this is due to scatol, plus another sexual hormone, but that there also other still hard to detect component that may greatly enhance the perceptions of these things.
So there are even unknown thing that can enhance the enhancers…
There are analytical standards for the thiols in cannabis. There are 2-3 main ones that show up but there are about a dozen different documented thiols in the plant. You just won’t see them in flower because they occur below 0.001%. Humans pick up on thiols at as little as 10 parts per billion so you could add some more zeros in there and it’d still affect the smell. You just need to test cannabis essential oils (terpenes) directly to be able to see them. A few of the same thiols you see in cannabis are in tons of fruits, vegetables, nuts, beer, wine, skunk butts. Etc
That’s not to say there are aren’t any we don’t know about yet. Given the highly reactive nature of the multiple thiols we do know about, there’s basically no way there aren’t other thiols/thiol derivatives in cannabis.
Thank you! Do you have any white papers or links to test results of these? I have been searching for this documentation for years! Thank you.
Here’s an interesting tale:
In the 80’s the DEA decided to spray pesticides on Mexican cartel crops from helicopters. Knowing contaminated crops would still be sold on the black market anyway, they decided to add an unpleasant smelling odorant to the pesticide to warn people it’s contaminated.
What did they pick to serve as a marker it’s dangerous to smoke? Only the loudest and skunkiest class of chemicals in the cannabis plant— Thiols. They encapsulated a Thiol derived from d-limonene so it wouldn’t stink up the choppers and dumped a bunch of skunky funk terps all over cartel crops to “deter” people from using it. They took the one plant that is considered more desirable when it smells skunky and made it even more skunky— to make people not want it.
That sounds entirely like something our government would do!
very interesting! had not heard that detail before: adding thiol to the herbicide they spray’d.
Yeah I think they would have been more successful if they added artificial cotton candy flavoring or something that cannabis users don’t like. Making it skunkier makes me feel like buyers would have assumed it was just some really loud Mexican cannabis.
Here’s a news article from 1979 that covered it. They said it would smell like “skunk essence” and “poo-poo [sic].” I’m sitting here thinking about strains like Skunk 1 and Dogshit respectively and wondering if they really were trying to deter people from using it or just make it more desirable and easier to track its origin with an encapsulated marker chemical.
Following up on @murphymurri 's instagram story post today…
Check out this cool site, you can buy interesting smelling things for the purpose of training your nose https://www.aroxa.com/beer/beer-flavour-standard/3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol/