Experience dependent tuning in olfactory processing

LOCATELLI FERNANDO; MARACHLIAN EMILIANO

Huerta Grande, Cordoba

Conferencia; Congreso SAN 2013; 2013

Sociedad Argentina de Investigaciones en Neurociencias

Title: ?Experience dependent tuning in olfactory processing?   Fernando Locatelli, Emiliano Marachlian   Laboratorio de Neurobiología de la Memoria, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires. IFIByNE- CONICET. Argentina   Animals live in a world of countless olfactory stimuli presented forming variable mixtures. In case of specialist animals, whose success depends on detection of defined molecules, odor detection is optimized by specific receptors. In the present work we asked if detection of relevant odors can be also optimized when the category ?relevant or irrelevant? is not fixed but depends on the experience of each individual. Honey bees provide a good model for this study, because their foraging behavior depends on generalist olfactory receptors and because they are able to learn the predictive value of the odors. Olfactory stimuli to which bees are normally exposed are mixtures, in which relevant odors can be masked by the presence of irrelevant ones. The significance of odors may change and bees have to keep their olfactory sense adjusted to these changes. The antenal lobe is the first olfactory neuropil were olfactory sensory neurons synapse projection neurons that convey olfactory information to other brain areas. We perform calcium imaging in projections neurons of the antennal lobe and measured the neural representation of mixtures and the pure components to test the hypothesis that relevant components are preferentially represented in the pattern of the mixture. We compared mixture patterns from naïve and trained bees and found that in trained animals the representation is more similar to the odor that predicts a reward. The results are consistent with a model in which plasticity in the antennal lobe can redefine the perceptual space according to experience.