Sensory and Motor Systems
Author: Federico Andrés Gascue | email: fgascue@gmail.com
Federico Gascue 1°, Nicolás Pírez 1°, Fernando Locatelli 1°
1° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias; UBA-CONICET, Argentina.
2° Departamento de Fisiologia, Biología Molecular y Celular, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, UBA.
The olfactory system is continuously exposed to an extraordinary range of chemical stimuli. To maintain sensitivity to meaningful odors the system must be adjusted based on animals experience. One of the main phenomena that adjust the system is sensory adaptation, which is defined as a decrease in sensitivity or response to an odor after a sustained exposure to it and depends on the immediately close experience of the animal. In this project, we investigate the role and the mechanisms involved in olfactory sensory adaptation using honey bees. By performing electroantennograms we measured the activity of olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) and characterized temporal aspects of this phenomenon such as induction, duration, and recovery time. We also analyzed whether adaptation depends on odor identity. We found that adaptation at the ORNs level, is odor specific and that odors that are relevant for the animal show a certain degree of resistance to adaptation. We also performed calcium imaging experiments to measure odor induced signals in the antennal lobe, the first olfactory neuropil in the insect brain. This allowed us to observe how adaptation changes the neural representation of odors and we describe that cross-adaptation occurs among odors that share activated glomeruli in the response pattern. The results emphasize that sensory adaptation is critical to maintain the olfactory system unsaturated and ready to detect changes in the olfactory context.