Acquisition of innate odor preference depends on spontaneous and experiential activities during critical period
- Stowers Institute for Medical Research, United States
Abstract
Animals possess an inborn ability to recognize certain odors to avoid predators, seek food and find mates. Innate odor preference has been thought to be genetically hardwired. Here we report that acquisition of innate odor recognition requires spontaneous neural activity and is influenced by sensory experience during early postnatal development. Genetic silencing of mouse olfactory sensory neurons during the critical period has little impact on odor sensitivity, discrimination, and recognition later in life. However, it abolishes innate odor preference and alters the patterns of activation in brain centers. Moreover, exposure to an aversive odor during the critical period abolishes aversion in adulthood in an odor-specific manner. The loss of innate aversion is associated with broadened projection of OSNs. Thus, a delicate balance of neural activity is required during the critical period in establishing innate odor preference and ectopic projection is a convergent mechanism to alter innate odor valence.
Data availability
Sequencing data have been deposited in GEO under accession codes GSE166457.All other data generated or analysed during this study will be available at https://www.stowers.org/research/publications/LIBPB-1613_2021.
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Author details
Funding
National Institutes of Health (R01DC008003)
- C Ron Yu
National Institutes of Health (R01DC014701)
- C Ron Yu
National Institutes of Health (R01DC016696)
- C Ron Yu
Stowers Institute for Medical Research (1021)
- C Ron Yu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Experimental protocols were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at Stowers Institute (protocol 2019-102) and in compliance with the NIH Guide for Care and Use of Animals.
Copyright
© 2021, Qiu 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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Acquisition of innate odor preference depends on spontaneous and experiential activities during critical period
eLife 10:e60546.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.60546
