Sensory and Motor Systems
Author: Lautaro Duarte | email: duartelautaro5@gmail.com
Lautaro Alejandro Duarte 1°, Nicolás Pírez 1°, Fernando Locatelli 1°
1° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias, UBA-CONICET
2° Departamento de Fisiología y Biología Molecular y Celular
Odorants are detected by olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) that project to the antennal lobe (AL), the first olfactory neuropil in the insect brain. Once in the AL, ORNs make synaptic contacts with: i) projection neurons (PNs) that send olfactory information to other brain areas; and ii) local neurons (LNs) that form a dense network of lateral interactions within the AL. Anatomical and functional studies indicate that this local network redistributes sensory information, presumably to enhance perception of meaningful odors. In this project we investigate the role of the GABAergic interactions in relation to learning dependent neural plasticity in the AL. For that aim, first we performed calcium imaging of odorant evoked responses in ORN before and after blocking GABAergic neurotransmission to reveal and measure the effect of the inhibitory local interactions in odor representations. Next, we tested how experience alters the representation of a binary mixture in which one of its constituents is subject to aversive learning. Preliminary results show that the representation of the mixture in the antennal lobe changes after an aversive learning in a way that the learned odor becomes more evident. Future experiments are directed to evaluate whether blocking the LNs activity using temperature sensitive shibire impairs learning dependent changes and the ability to detect the learned odor.