SENSORY ADAPTATION AND ITS EFFECT ON DETECTION OF MINOR COMPONENTS IN ODOR MIXTURES

FERNANDO LOCATELLI; FEDERICO GASCUE; NICOLAS PIREZ

Cagliari

Simposio; ESITO Symposium 2017; 2017

Universidad de Wurzburg, Alemania

SENSORYADAPTATION AND ITS EFFECT ON DETECTION OF MINOR COMPONENTS IN ODOR MIXTURES. LocatelliF 1,2  , Gascue F 1, Pírez N 1,2.1.Departamento de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Celular, Facultad de CienciasExactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina2.Instituto de Fisiología Biología Molecular y Neurociencias, UBA-CONICET,Argentina    locatellif@fbmc.fcen.uba.ar Animals processand perceive environmental information in flexible ways. Some changes inperception are sustained and involve learning and memory processes while othersoccur quickly and are only transient. In this framework, sensory adaptation isdefined as the phenomenon by which the sensitivity to a stimulus decreases aftera sustained exposure to it. This phenomenon is characterized by a rapid loss ofsensitivity and full recovery within a few seconds after the stimulusdisappears. Curiously, this phenomenon has been mostly described and studied byfocusing on what the animal fails to perceive, but not on the consequences thatit has on the perception of the stimuli for which the animal has not experiencedadaptation. In this project we study the enriching effect that sensory adaptationhas on the ability of animals to detect stimuli to which it has not been adaptedand that would remain overshadowed by dominant stimuli under normal conditions.We use honey bees Apis mellífera that have a high capacity to learn andrecognize odors. By doing behavioral experiments we show that this phenomenonreduces appetitive  learning of adaptedstimuli while it favors learning of minor components that would normally stayoccluded. By doing calcium imaging experiments, we determined that activationpatterns that encode mixtures in the antennal lobe are drastically alteredafter sensory adaptation, in a way that favors the representation of stimuli thatare present at sub-threshold concentrations. The results obtained so far emphasizethat sensory adaptation is a fundamental mechanism to increase the sensitivityof the animal and not to reduce it.