Olfactory mixture detection in Drosophila melanogaster.

DUARTE, L. A.; KLAPPENBACH, M.; PÍREZ, N.; LOCATELLI, F. F.

San Luis

Conferencia; XXXVIII Reunión Anual Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias; 2023

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

Odorants are detected by olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) that project to the antennal lobe (AL), the first olfactory neuropil in the insect brain. In the AL, ORNs make synaptic contacts with: i) projection neurons (PNs) that send olfactory information to other brain areas; and ii) local interneurons (LNs) that form a dense network of lateral interactions within the AL. Functional studies indicate that this network redistributes sensory information, presumably to enhance perception of meaningful odors. In this project we investigate the role of GABAergic interactions in relation to learning dependent neural plasticity in the AL. Our previous work showed that the representation of a mixture in the AL changes after aversive learning, making the learnt odor more salient. In this study, we conducted an aversive olfactory conditioning using a T-maze. We train flies to associate an electric shock with an odor. In a test session, we expected that flies avoid the odor that was paired with the shock. To study how animals perceive mixtures, we evaluate the ability of the animals to detect the learned odor immersed in a binary mixture. To do that, we present the flies two stimuli: a novel odor vesus a mixture composed by the associated odor. Preliminary results show that in certain proportions, flies can detect learned odor. Future experiments are directed to evaluate whether blocking the LNs activity impairs learning dependent changes and the ability to detect learned odorants.