Widespread Receptor-driven Modulation in Peripheral Olfactory Coding

Overview

Journal Science

Specialty Science

Date 2020 Apr 11

PMID 32273438

Citations 43

Authors

Lu Xu

Wenze Li

Venkatakaushik Voleti

Dong-Jing Zou

Elizabeth M C Hillman

Stuart Firestein

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Olfactory responses to single odors have been well characterized but in reality we are continually presented with complex mixtures of odors. We performed high-throughput analysis of single-cell responses to odor blends using Swept Confocally Aligned Planar Excitation (SCAPE) microscopy of intact mouse olfactory epithelium, imaging ~10,000 olfactory sensory neurons in parallel. In large numbers of responding cells, mixtures of odors did not elicit a simple sum of the responses to individual components of the blend. Instead, many neurons exhibited either antagonism or enhancement of their response in the presence of another odor. All eight odors tested acted as both agonists and antagonists at different receptors. We propose that this peripheral modulation of responses increases the capacity of the olfactory system to distinguish complex odor mixtures.

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