The long-term goal of this research is to understand how the olfactory system encodes information about odors. In the olfactory bulb, where sensory input is first processed, olfactory information is encoded, at least in part, by spatially organized patterns of neural activity. Experiments that visualize the input to olfactory bulb glomeruli have revealed that these spatial patterns are also temporally dynamic. Temporal patterns of sensory input to glomeruli are concentration-dependent, odor-specific, and stereotyped across animals. This novel finding has important implications for considering odor-coding strategies in the bulb. The proposed experiments will investigate how the dynamics of glomerular activity shape how odor information is encoded and processed. The experiments will image activity in receptor neurons and mitral cells to 1) characterize how patterns of glomerular activity change during the time-course of odor sampling, and 2) characterize how these patterns are transformed from the level of sensory input to the level of mitral cell output from the bulb. The experiments should improve our understanding of odor coding strategies, and the role of the olfactory bulb in shaping this code. Understanding how the brain encodes and processes sensory information could be important in the treatment of olfactory or other sensory deficits.
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