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

GASCUE, F.; PÍREZ, N.; LOCATELLI, F

Buenos Aires

Simposio; Simposio Fronteras en Biociencia 3; 2018

IBIoBA

Sensory systems needs to adjust themselves based in the experience of the animals in order to optimize the detection and perception of relevant information over stimuli without predictive values. One of the main phenomena implicated in this process is olfactory adaptation, which is defined as the decrease of the sensitivity or response to a stimulus after a sustained exposure to it. This phenomenon may occur in brief intervals of time and depends on the immediate experience of the animal. Curiously, it has been primarily 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 to study the enhancing effect that olfactory adaptation has on the ability of animals to detect odor cues that would otherwise remain overshadowed by a dominant stimuli. By means of behavioral experiments, we characterize the dynamics of this phenomenon and show that it reduces appetitive learning of adapted stimuli in a binary mixture of odors, while it can facilitate learning of the minor component in cases in which it would normally stay occluded. Additionally, by performing calcium imaging experiments to measure odor induced signals in the antennal lobe, we determined that glomerular activation patterns that encode mixtures are drastically altered after olfactory adaptation, in a way that favors the representation of stimuli that are present at lower concentrations. These results suggest that olfactory adaptation is critical to allow detection of minor components present in complex mixtures, emphasizing that sensory adaptation is a fundamental mechanism to increase the sensitivity of the animals.