Topic: olfactory navigation

Olfactory navigation is essential for the survival of living beings from unicellular organisms to mammals. In the wild, rodents combine odor information with an internal spatial representation of the environment for foraging and navigation. What are the neural circuits in the brain that implement these behaviours? My research addresses this question by examining the synaptic circuits and neural population activity in the olfactory cortex to understand the integration of olfactory and spatial information. Primary olfactory (piriform) cortex (PCx) has long been recognized as a highly associative

Olfactory navigation provides a tractable model for studying the circuit basis of sensori-motor transformations and goal-directed behaviour. Macroscopic organisms typically navigate in odor plumes that provide a noisy and uncertain signal about the location of an odor source. Work in many species has suggested that animals accomplish this task by combining temporal processing of dynamic odor information with an estimate of wind direction. Our lab has been using adult walking Drosophila to understand both the computational algorithms and the neural circuits that support navigation in a plume