Olfactory processing in the antennal lobe of the honey bee: representation of mixtures and pure odors

MARACHLIAN E; LOCATELLI F

Huerta Grande, Cordoba

Congreso; II REUNION CONJUNTA DE NEUROCIENCIAS; 2010

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

Olfactory processing in the antennal lobe of the honey bee: representation of mixtures and pure odors. Emiliano Marachlian y Fernando Locatelli The antennal lobe (AL) is the first processing centre for olfactory information in the insect brain. It receives information from sensory neurons and from it depart projection neurons that convey odor information to other brain areas. Some evidences suggest that experience affects the AL network in a way that the animal gains sensibility for relevant stimuli. We hypothesize that such ability should be important in the context of odors mixtures, in which the presence of a relevant and meaningful odorant can be overshadowed by another confounding and irrelevant odor. We did calcium imaging in projection neurons of the antennal lobe and determined the activation patterns for single odors that are floral components, 1-hexanol, 2-octanone, acetophenone, geraniol, and the respective binary mixtures. We report our first results with representation of pure odors and mixtures in naive animals. All tested odors elicited differential and unique spatiotemporal activity patterns with some degree of overlap. Representation of the binary mixtures can be mainly predicted based on the patterns of the pure odors with only minor cases of synergistic and antagonistic interaction. Next experiments will study if appetitive learning with one component affects mixture representation.