Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittency
- Yale University, United States
- John B. Pierce Laboratory, United States
- University of Colorado Boulder, United States
Abstract
In order to survive, animals often need to navigate a complex odor landscape where odors can exist in airborne plumes. Several odor plume properties change with distance from the odor source, providing potential navigational cues to searching animals. Here we focus on odor intermittency, a temporal odor plume property that measures the fraction of time odor is above a threshold at a given point within the plume and decreases with increasing distance from the odor source. We sought to determine if mice can use changes in intermittency to locate an odor source. To do so, we trained mice on an intermittency discrimination task. We establish that mice can discriminate odor plume samples of low and high intermittency and that the neural responses in the olfactory bulb can account for task performance and support intermittency encoding. Modulation of sniffing, a behavioral parameter that is highly dynamic during odor-guided navigation, affects both behavioral outcome on the intermittency discrimination task as well as neural representation of intermittency. Together, this work demonstrates that intermittency is an odor plume property that can inform olfactory search and more broadly supports the notion that mammalian odor-based navigation can be guided by temporal odor plume properties.
Data availability
All data and analysis codes are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.crjdfn387
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Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittencyDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.crjdfn387.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (NSF/CIHR/DFG/FRQ/UKRI-MRC Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience Program (Award #2014217))
- Ankita Gumaste
- Keeley L Baker
- Michelle Izydorczak
- Aaron C True
- John P. Crimaldi
- Justus Verhagen
National Institutes of Health (NRSA 1F31DC018708)
- Ankita Gumaste
National Science Foundation (BRAIN 1555880)
- Ankita Gumaste
- Keeley L Baker
- Michelle Izydorczak
- Justus Verhagen
National Science Foundation (BRAIN 1555862)
- Aaron C True
- John P. Crimaldi
National Institutes of Health (R01 DC014723)
- Justus Verhagen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All procedures were performed in accordance with protocols approved by the Pierce Animal Care and Use Committee (PACUC) JV1-2019. These procedures are in agreement with the National Institutes of Health Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
Copyright
© 2024, Gumaste 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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Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittency
eLife 13:e85303.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85303
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