Olfactory receptor neurons generate multiple response motifs, increasing coding space dimensionality
- Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, United States
- University of California, San Diego, United States
- Amsterdam University Medical Centers, Netherlands
Abstract
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 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 these response features could provide benefits for olfactory navigation, including determining the distance to an odor source.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study have been deposited at Open Science Framework and can be accessed here: https://osf.io/8bs72/
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Office of Naval Research (N00014-16-1-2829)
- Maxim Bazhenov
National Institutes of Health (RF1MH117155)
- Maxim Bazhenov
National Institutes of Health (R01NS109553)
- Maxim Bazhenov
National Science Foundation (IIS-1724405)
- Maxim Bazhenov
Obra Social La Caixa (ID 100010434 with code LCF/BQ/ES15/10360004)
- Ana P Milan
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Intramural)
- Mark A Stopfer
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Olfactory receptor neurons generate multiple response motifs, increasing coding space dimensionality
eLife 12:e79152.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.79152
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