Olfaction

Olfaction facilitates a large variety of animal behaviors such as feeding, mating, and communication. In the mammal olfactory system, the olfactory bulb (OB) and piriform cortex (PCx) are responsible for preliminary odor encoding and corresponding memory storage respectively. Recent evidence demonstrated the dynamic nature of OB and PCx odor representations upon frequent repetition of the same odors over days, and this phenomenon, termed representational drift, should be the consequence of highly plastic nature of biologically constrained synapses in the olfactory system. In this work, we buil

…and the nature of interactions between olfaction and language related brain’s neural resources are not well understood [1]. Behavioral task: the data that we used to compare our model output were collected from a Swedish National Study on Aging and Care in Kungsholmen (SNAC-K), where ~2500 subjects underwent an odor naming test of

…project aims to assess the role of olfaction in the establishment of alloparental behaviors and the ability of mice to recognize familiar from “alien” pups (ie pups never encountered before, with a different olfactory signature). We found that virgin mice display simil

Olfaction is a crucial sense for many species, influencing behavioral responses like mating and reproduction. A significant dopaminergic (DA) population is found in the mouse main olfactory bulb (OB), with inhibitory interneurons identified by tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) expression and divided into two major groups (i.e., small and large cells) according to their shape, generation time, and biophysical characteristics. Although it is known that salient stimuli activate midbrain DA neurons, it is unclear if OB DA cells are involved in processing ethologically relevant odorants, especially those a

Olfaction is considered the evolutionarily oldest sense, which together with somatosensation, is crucial for neonatal well-being before audition and vision start engaging the brain. Using anatomical and functional approaches, we reveal that olfactory-driven activity propagates to a large part of the cortex during the first postnatal week, and enhances whisker-evoked activation of primary whisker somatosensory cortex (wS1). This effect disappears in adult mice, due to the loss of neonatal excitatory connectivity from olfactory cortex to wS1. By performing developmental olfactory-deprivation and

Sensory coding in olfaction remains poorly understood. Unlike in vision, where the stimulus space is well-characterized, the complexity of the "odor space" and the complexity of the olfactory receptor (OR) repertoire has hindered our understanding of odor coding and processing. There is no consensus on key defining features of odor sensation, such as the dimensionality of odor perceptual or odor receptor space. It is commonly conjectured that the ORs transform the high-dimensional "chemical space" to a relatively low-dimensional space of neuronal representations. We developed a novel method f

For many animals, the sense of olfaction plays a major role in controlling sexual behaviors. Olfaction helps animals to detect mates, discriminate their status, and ultimately, decide on their behavioral output such as courtship behavior or aggression. Specific pheromone cues and receptors have provided a useful model to study how sensory inputs are converted into certain behavioral outputs. With the aid of recent advances in tools to record and manipulate genetically defined neurons, our understanding of the neural basis of sexual and social behavior has expanded substantially. I will discuss