For instance, in the Sniffin' Sticks test (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9056084) n-butanol is used in the threshold test and 16 everyday odors, e.g., orange, garlic and fish, are used for odor identification.

Thank you so much. The paper and your answer were of great help.

many years ago I have used odorant stimulations by mean of amyl acetate pulses in order to perform elctrophysiological recordings in the olfactory bulb (in mouse in vivo)

Odor identification and threshold testing are different.  Odor identification is what the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test is designed to assess; the concentrations are selected to be above the odor threshold for most subjects.

Odor thresholds typically vary by a factor of 100 for individual subjects within a population.  Thresholds can be measured by several acceptable means.  In the article below we used flavor profile as a method to determine the threshold characteristics of hexanal in water. This approach may also be useful for your application.

 Ömür-Özbek; P. and A.M. Dietrich. Developing hexanal as an odor reference standard for sensory analysis of drinking water, Water Research, 42:2598-2604, 2008.

Another procedure for measuring thresholds is using triangle tests. This method is described in: American Standards for Testing Materials (ASTM) 2011. Standard Practice for Determination of Odor and Taste Thresholds by a Forced Choice Ascending Concentration series Method of Limits. E679-04. In annual Book of Standards, Vol. 15.08 American Society for Testing of Materials, Philadelphia, PA.

I am not aware of any standards in the testing of olfaction. However, to test the ability to discriminate between odorants, the pure single molecule odorants would be preferred rather than natural complexes like rose and coffee. Another consideration would be to choose odorants that activate a large number of olfactory sensory neurons. In many cases, odorants are chosen with the goal of the research. If one studies the detection thresholds of explosives in detector dogs, the choice of odorants is quite obvious. For testing of odorants in food, wine, and perfume, special representative molecules are used. To study the interaction of different sensory modalities, like olfactory and visual senses, the pictorial image and chemical representations are used.

Thanks a lot for your response, Prof. Vodyanoy! Our goal at that time was more in line with prognosis of diseases using the olfactory sensory perception, so the chemical representations of common odors should have been used.

There is an article that gives a table of common odors and their chemical representation. Attached please find a copy of this paper.

I wish you success.