Work

Author response: Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittency

Year: 2023

Type: peer-review

Abstract: In order to survive, animals often need to navigate a complex odor landscape where odors can exist in airborne plumes.Several odor plume properties change with distance from the odor source, providing potential navigational cues to searching animals.Here, we focus on odor intermittency, a temporal odor plume property that measures the fraction of time odor is above a threshold at a given point within the plume and decreases with increasing distance from the odor source.We sought to determine if mice can use changes in intermittency to locate an odor source.To do so, we trained mice on an intermittency discrimination task.We establish that mice can discriminate odor plume samples of low and high intermittency and that the neural responses in the olfactory bulb can account for task performance and support intermittency encoding.Modulation of sniffing, a behavioral parameter that is highly dynamic during odor-guided navigation, affects both behavioral outcome on the intermittency discrimination task and neural representation of intermittency.Together, this work demonstrates that intermittency is an odor plume property that can inform olfactory search and more broadly supports the notion that mammalian odor-based navigation can be guided by temporal odor plume properties. Editor's evaluationThis important work addresses the novel question for the vertebrate olfactory community of whether mice can discriminate odorant intermittency.The evidence supporting the conclusions is convincing.The authors used multiple experimental and analytical tools.The work will be of interest to sensory physiologists, both working in olfaction and navigation.

Source: eLife

DOI: 10.7554/elife.85303.sa2