Projection neurons in Drosophila antennal lobes signal the acceleration of odor concentrations

  1. Anmo J Kim
  2. Aurel A Lazar  Is a corresponding author
  3. Yevgeniy B Slutskiy
  1. The Rockefeller University, United States
  2. Columbia University, United States

Abstract

Temporal experience of odor gradients is important in spatial orientation of animals. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster exhibits robust odor-guided behaviors in an odor gradient field. In order to investigate how early olfactory circuits process temporal variation of olfactory stimuli, we subjected flies to precisely defined odor concentration waveforms and examined spike patterns of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) and projection neurons (PNs). We found a significant temporal transformation between OSN and PN spike patterns, manifested by the PN output strongly signaling the OSN spike rate and its rate of change. A simple two-dimensional model admitting the OSN spike rate and its rate of change as inputs closely predicted the PN output. When cascaded with the rate-of-change encoding by OSNs, PNs primarily signal the acceleration and the rate-of-change of dynamic odor stimuli to higher brain centers, thereby enabling animals to reliably respond to the onsets of odor concentrations.

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Author details

  1. Anmo J Kim

    The Rockefeller University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Aurel A Lazar

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, United States
    For correspondence
    aurel@ee.columbia.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Yevgeniy B Slutskiy

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Copyright

© 2015, Kim et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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  1. Anmo J Kim
  2. Aurel A Lazar
  3. Yevgeniy B Slutskiy
(2015)
Projection neurons in Drosophila antennal lobes signal the acceleration of odor concentrations
eLife 4:e06651.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06651

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https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06651

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