Spatiotemporal coding of natural odors in the olfactory bulb
Mengxue LIU, Nan JIANG, Yingqian SHI, Ping WANG, Liujing ZHUANG
Biosensor National Special Laboratory, Key Laboratory for Biomedical Engineering of Education Ministry, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; The MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Science & Brain-machine Integration, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China; State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200050, China
zhuangliujing@zju.edu.cn, cnpwang@zju.edu.cn
Abstract: Smell that exists in the natural environment is composed of numerous odor molecules (Bushdid et al., 2014). The mammalian olfactory system can accurately identify environmental olfactory cues, including those related to food selection, recognition of conspecifics/predators, and emotional responses. Recent studies utilizing two-photon calcium imaging have demonstrated that odors, when present at their natural concentrations, elicit distinct patterns of neural activity within the olfactory system (Murthy and Rokni, 2017; Xu et al., 2020). However, knowledge of how food-related odors are coded in the olfactory system remains elusive.