Odor Discrimination in Drosophila: From Neural Population Codes to Behavior

By M. Parnas, Andrew C. Lin, Wolf Huetteroth, Gero Miesenböck. 2013

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Taking advantage of the well-characterized olfactory system of Drosophila, we derive a simple quantitative relationship between patterns of odorant receptor activation, the resulting internal representations of odors, and odor discrimination. Second-order excitatory and inhibitory projection neurons (ePNs and iPNs) convey olfactory information to the lateral horn, a brain region implicated in innate odor-driven behaviors. We show that the distance between ePN activity patterns is the main determinant of a fly’s spontaneous discrimination behavior. Manipulations that silence subsets of ePNs have graded behavioral consequences, and effect sizes are predicted by changes in ePN distances. ePN distances predict only innate, not learned, behavior because the latter engages the mushroom body, which enables differentiated responses to even very similar odors. Inhibition from iPNs, which scales with olfactory stimulus strength, enhances innate discrimination of closely related odors, by imposing a high-pass filter on transmitter release from ePN terminals that increases the distance between odor representations.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Neuronal mechanisms underlying innate and learned olfactory processing in Drosophila. (2019, background): “At the next synapse, between PNs and neurons in the lateral 76 horn (LH), lateral inhibition by inhibitory projection neurons enhances naive discrimination of 77 similar odors by increasing distances in ‘neural activity space’ between PNs’ population 78 responses to different odors [16,17].”
Insects have the capacity for subjective experience (2016, background): “…on cortical and midbrain structures (Damasio, 1999), several authors have argued that the former is supported by the midbrain and subcortical structures (Damasio & Carvalho, 2013; Mashour & Alkire, 2013; Merker, 2005, 2007; B. Merker, 2013; Parvizi & Damasio, 2001; Penfield & Jasper, 1954).”
Activity of Defined Mushroom Body Output Neurons Underlies Learned Olfactory Behavior in Drosophila (2015, background): “The LH is largely believed to be responsible for driving innate behavioral responses to odors, since blocking all mushroom body neuron output has little consequence on these behaviors (Heimbeck et al., 2001; Parnas et al., 2013).”