Topic: transient amplification

Drosophila olfactory sensory hairs ("sensilla") typically house two olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) which can laterally inhibit each other via electrical ("ephaptic") coupling. ORN pairing is highly stereotyped and genetically determined. Thus, olfactory signals arriving in the Antennal Lobe (AL) have been pre-processed by a fixed and shallow network at the periphery. To uncover the functional significance of this organization, we developed a nonlinear phenomenological model of asymmetrically coupled ORNs responding to odor mixture stimuli. We derived an analytical solution to the ORNs’ dyna

Cortical neurons exhibit rich, time-dependent patterns of activity that are often selective to specific stimuli. From a dynamical systems perspective, such complex activity can be conceptualized as ON/OFF responses, or also as transient amplification. It is still unclear if transient amplification is an artifact of a carefully tuned model, or an intrinsically occurring phenomenon. Moreover, minute changes in the connectivity of amplifying networks can cause catastrophic dynamic instabilities. How biological circuits could settle into stable, yet amplifying connectivity regimes in an ever-chang