IFIBYNE   05513
INSTITUTO DE FISIOLOGIA, BIOLOGIA MOLECULAR Y NEUROCIENCIAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Odor intensity and gain control in the honey bee olfactory system
Autor/es:
RAMÓN HUERTA; AYELEN NALLY; EMILIANO MARACHLIAN; FERNANDO LOCATELLI
Lugar:
Montevideo
Reunión:
Congreso; International Congress of Neuroethology; 2016
Resumen:
Animals rely on chemical cues to extract ecologically relevant information from the environment. This information is detected and primarily encoded by the olfactory sensory neurons. Each specific odor recruits a particular combination of receptors that provides the input for its internal representation. However, in natural conditions, meaningful odors are normally present at different concentrations that produce different activity patterns in terms of both intensity of activation and combination of receptors. A central problem is how the animals recognize the same odor across different concentrations in spite of the different input patterns. We work on the hypothesis that local inhibition in the antennal lobe at processing of the olfactory information provides the gain control that contributes to stabilize odor identity independently of its intensity. We use honey bees as model animal for studying odor generalization across intensities and to understand the neural computations that underlie generalization. First, in behavioral experiments we describe odor generalization across intensities. Second, using calcium imaging we measured the neural representation of high and low odor concentrations in the projection neuron at the antennal lobe output. Using different GABA blockers we describe the contribution of the local inhibitory network in stabilizing odor patterns across intensities. We found that GABA-A and GABA-B components contribute differentially in terms of the functional range of odor intensity and in the temporal profile of the activation elicited by odors. Finally, the results are formalized in a computational model of the antennal lobe that provides detail of the inhibitory network.