In Vivo Recordings in the Early Olfactory System

We believe that the lack of a deeper understanding of how Olfactory Sensory Neurons (OSNs) encode odorants has fundamentally hindered progress in understanding olfactory signal processing in higher brain centers. Moreover, the lack of precise stimulus delivery and measurement systems has fundamentally limited the progress of functional identification in olfaction.

To address this limitation, we developed a novel in vivo experimental setup with precise and reproducible delivery of airborne stimuli. This experimental setup enabled us to apply system identification methods to OSNs in Drosophila. We applied time-varying odorant stimuli and recorded in vivo the response of Projection Neurons (PNs) postsynaptic to OSNs. These novel type of recordings have shown that individual OSNs and PNs encode the gradient and acceleration of odorant concentration waveforms, respectively. This research was performed in collaboration with Dr. Richard Axel in the Axel Laboratory.

1. Anmo J. Kim, Aurel A. Lazar and Yevgeniy B. Slutskiy, System Identification of Drosophila Olfactory Sensory Neurons , Journal of Computational Neuroscience, Vol. 30, No.1, February 2011, pp. 143-161, Special Issue on Methods of Information Theory.
2. A.J. Kim, A.A. Lazar, and Y.B. Slutskiy, Projection Neurons in Drosophila Antennal Lobes Signal the Acceleration of Odor Concentrations, eLife 2015;10.7554/eLife.06651, June 2015.
3. A.A. Lazar and C.-H. Yeh, Functional Identification of an Antennal Lobe DM4 Projection Neuron of the Fruit Fly, Computational Neuroscience Meeting, Volume 15, July 2014, Québec City, Canada.

The Bionet Group is supported by grants from