Continuous odor profile monitoring to study olfactory navigation in small animals
- Princeton University, United States
- New York University, United States
Abstract
Olfactory navigation is observed across species and plays a crucial role in locating resources for survival. In the laboratory, understanding the behavioral strategies and neural circuits underlying odor-taxis requires a detailed understanding of the animal's sensory environment. For small model organisms like C. elegans and larval D. melanogaster, controlling and measuring the odor environment experienced by the animal can be challenging, especially for airborne odors, which are subject to subtle effects from airflow, temperature variation, and from the odor's adhesion, adsorption or reemission. Here we present a method to control and measure airborne odor concentration in an arena compatible with an agar substrate. Our method allows continuous controlling and monitoring of the odor profile while imaging animal behavior. We construct stationary chemical landscapes in an odor flow chamber through spatially patterned odorized air. The odor concentration is measured with a spatially distributed array of digital gas sensors. Careful placement of the sensors allows the odor concentration across the arena to be continuously inferred in space and monitored through time. We use this approach to measure the odor concentration that each animal experiences as it undergoes chemotaxis behavior and report chemotaxis strategies for C. elegans and D. melanogaster larvae populations as they navigate spatial odor landscapes.
Data availability
Recordings for odor flow control, concentration measurements, and behavioral tracking data are publicly available: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.21737303. Compressed 'zip' archive Chen_flow_20222.zip contains raw data. Compressed 'zip' archive flow_chamber_machined_components.zip contains CAD and other design files related to the hardware.
Article and author information
Author details
Andrew Michael Leifer
Funding
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (DP2-NS116768)
- Andrew Michael Leifer
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (DP2-EB022359)
- Marc H Gershow
Simons Foundation (SCGB #543003)
- Andrew Michael Leifer
National Science Foundation (1455015)
- Marc H Gershow
National Science Foundation (IOS-1845137)
- Andrew Michael Leifer
National Science Foundation (PHY-1748958)
- Marc H Gershow
- Andrew Michael Leifer
National Science Foundation (PHY-1734030)
- Andrew Michael Leifer
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (2919.02)
- Marc H Gershow
- Andrew Michael Leifer
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2023, Chen 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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Continuous odor profile monitoring to study olfactory navigation in small animals
eLife 12:e85910.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.85910
