Neuronal pattern separation in the olfactory bulb improves odor discrimination learning
By Olivier Gschwend, Nixon M. Abraham, Samuel Lagier, F. Begnaud, I. Rodriguez, A. Carleton. 2015
177 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Neuronal pattern separation is thought to enable the brain to disambiguate sensory stimuli with overlapping features, thereby extracting valuable information. In the olfactory system, it remains unknown whether pattern separation acts as a driving force for sensory discrimination and the learning thereof. We found that overlapping odor-evoked input patterns to the mouse olfactory bulb (OB) were dynamically reformatted in the network on the timescale of a single breath, giving rise to separated patterns of activity in an ensemble of output neurons, mitral/tufted (M/T) cells. Notably, the extent of pattern separation in M/T assemblies predicted behavioral discrimination performance during the learning phase. Furthermore, exciting or inhibiting GABAergic OB interneurons, using optogenetics or pharmacogenetics, altered pattern separation and thereby odor discrimination learning in a bidirectional way. In conclusion, we propose that the OB network can act as a pattern separator facilitating olfactory stimulus distinction, a process that is sculpted by synaptic inhibition.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Sensory Systems
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Citations in the corpus
- Re-evaluating circuit mechanisms underlying pattern separation (2019, positive): “In vivo recordings have recently shown that the responses of mitral and tufted cells to different odour mixtures tend to be less correlated than the responses of their inputs (Gschwend et al., 2015).”
- Inhibitory circuits of the mammalian main olfactory bulb. (2017, background): “2C1) (Fukunaga et al. 2014; but see Gschwend et al. 2015).”
- Adult-born neurons facilitate olfactory bulb pattern separation during task engagement (2018, unknown): “These dynamics of ABNs may underlie the observations that experience and learning profoundly shape the representations of odorant stimuli by olfactory bulb principal neurons (Chu et al., 2016, 2017; Doucette and Restrepo, 2008; Gschwend et al., 2015; Kato et al., 2012; Yamada et al., 2017).”