Study of the dynamics of olfactory adaptation in Apis mellifera and its effect on the perception of binary mixtures.

GASCUE FEDERICO; PÍREZ NICOLÁS; LOCATELLI FERNANDO

Buenos Aires

Simposio; Fronteras en Biociencia 3; 2018

IBioBA-MPSP (Instituto de investigación en Biomedicina de Buenos Aires, CONICET - Partner Institute of the Max Planck Society)

Sensory systems needs to adjust themselves based in the experience of the animals in order to optimizethe detection and perception of relevant information over stimuli without predictive values. One of themain phenomena implicated in this process is olfactory adaptation, which is defined as the decrease ofthe sensitivity or response to a stimulus after a sustained exposure to it. This phenomenon may occur inbrief intervals of time and depends on the immediate experience of the animal. Curiously, it has beenprimarily described and studied by focusing on what the animal fails to perceive due to the adaptation,but not on the consequences that it has on other stimuli present. In this project, we use Apis mellifera tostudy the enhancing effect that olfactory adaptation has on the ability of animals to detect odor cuesthat would otherwise remain overshadowed by a dominant stimuli. By means of behavioralexperiments, we characterize the dynamics of this phenomenon and show that it reduces appetitivelearning of adapted stimuli in a binary mixture of odors, while it can facilitate learning of the minorcomponent in cases in which it would normally stay occluded. Additionally, by performing calciumimaging experiments to measure odor induced signals in the antennal lobe, we determined thatglomerular activation patterns that encode mixtures are drastically altered after olfactory adaptation, ina way that favors the representation of stimuli that are present at lower concentrations. These resultssuggest that olfactory adaptation is critical to allow detection of minor components present in complexmixtures, emphasizing that sensory adaptation is a fundamental mechanism to increase the sensitivityof the animals.