title: Keeping their distance? Odor response patterns along the concentration range.
abstract: We investigate the interplay of odor identity and concentration coding in the antennal lobe (AL) of the honeybee Apis mellifera. In this primary olfactory center of the honeybee brain, odors are encoded by the spatio-temporal response patterns of olfactory glomeruli. With rising odor concentration, further glomerular responses are recruited into the patterns, which affects distances between the patterns. Based on calcium-imaging recordings, we found that such pattern broadening renders distances between glomerular response patterns closer to chemical distances between the corresponding odor molecules. Our results offer an explanation for the honeybee's improved odor discrimination performance at higher odor concentrations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurobiology, University of Konstanz Konstanz, Germany ; Bioinformatics and Information Mining, University of Konstanz Konstanz, Germany.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Strauch
authors.forename: Mathias
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ditzen
authors.forename: C Giovanni
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Galizia
keywords: calcium-imaging; chemical dissimilarity; glomerular pattern; honeybees; odor concentration coding; odor identity coding