TY - JOUR TI - Olfactory receptor neurons generate multiple response motifs, increasing coding space dimensionality AU - Kim, Brian AU - Haney, Seth AU - Milan, Ana P AU - Joshi, Shruti AU - Aldworth, Zane AU - Rulkov, Nikolai AU - Kim, Alexander T AU - Bazhenov, Maxim AU - Stopfer, Mark A A2 - Sengupta, Piali A2 - Nawrot, Martin VL - 12 PY - 2023 DA - 2023/01/31 SP - e79152 C1 - eLife 2023;12:e79152 DO - 10.7554/eLife.79152 UR - https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.79152 AB - Odorants binding to olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) trigger bursts of action potentials, providing the brain with its only experience of the olfactory environment. Our recordings made in vivo from locust ORNs showed that odor-elicited firing patterns comprise four distinct response motifs, each defined by a reliable temporal profile. Different odorants could elicit different response motifs from a given ORN, a property we term motif switching. Further, each motif undergoes its own form of sensory adaptation when activated by repeated plume-like odor pulses. A computational model constrained by our recordings revealed that organizing responses into multiple motifs provides substantial benefits for classifying odors and processing complex odor plumes: each motif contributes uniquely to encode the plume’s composition and structure. Multiple motifs and motif switching further improve odor classification by expanding coding dimensionality. Our model demonstrated that these response features could provide benefits for olfactory navigation, including determining the distance to an odor source. KW - odor KW - sensory encoding KW - combinatorial KW - computational modeling KW - Schistocerca americana KW - information JF - eLife SN - 2050-084X PB - eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd ER -