Topic: odor concentration

Animals identify odors based on the combinatorial activation of olfactory sensory neurons having distinct chemical receptive fields. However, as the dose response of any olfactory sensory neuron is believed to follow a sigmoidal function that grows monotonically until it reaches a plateau, the subset of olfactory sensory neurons activated by an odor is expected to scale up with the odor concentration, undercutting the efficiency of combinatorial coding. Here we show that olfactory sensory neurons can in fact undergo a silent state upon strong and prolonged excitation called depolarization bloc