Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, United States; Brown University - National Institutes of Health Graduate Partnership Program, Providence, United States
Seth Haney
Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States
Ana P Milan
Department of Clinical Neurophysiology and MEG Center, Amsterdam Neuroscience, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Shruti Joshi
Department of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States
Odorants binding to olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) trigger bursts of action potentials, providing the brain with its only experience of the olfactory environment. Our recordings made in vivo from locust ORNs showed that odor-elicited firing patterns comprise four distinct response motifs, each defined by a reliable temporal profile. Different odorants could elicit different response motifs from a given ORN, a property we term motif switching. Further, each motif undergoes its own form of sensory adaptation when activated by repeated plume-like odor pulses. A computational model constrained by our recordings revealed that organizing responses into multiple motifs provides substantial benefits for classifying odors and processing complex odor plumes: each motif contributes uniquely to encode the plume’s composition and structure. Multiple motifs and motif switching further improve odor classification by expanding coding dimensionality. Our model demonstrated that these response features could provide benefits for olfactory navigation, including determining the distance to an odor source.
