Topic: olfactory background subtraction

Recordings from neural populations can be biased towards cells that are spontaneously active, and it is often implicitly assumed that stimulus responses will be unrelated to spontaneous activity. To avoid such biases [1] performed blind whole-cell patch clamp recordings of olfactory bulb mitral cells. Intriguingly, these recordings revealed an inverse relationship between spontaneous and odor-evoked activity: cells that were highly active at baseline were often quiet during odor presentation, while conversely, `silent' cells, quiet at baseline, dominated odor responses. In this study we use a