title: Intermittency coding in the primary olfactory system: a neural substrate for olfactory scene analysis.
abstract: The spatial and temporal characteristics of the visual and acoustic sensory input are indispensable attributes for animals to perform scene analysis. In contrast, research in olfaction has focused almost exclusively on how the nervous system analyzes the quality and quantity of the sensory signal and largely ignored the spatiotemporal dimension especially in longer time scales. Yet, detailed analyses of the turbulent, intermittent structure of water- and air-borne odor plumes strongly suggest that spatio-temporal information in longer time scales can provide major cues for olfactory scene analysis for animals. We show that a bursting subset of primary olfactory receptor neurons (bORNs) in lobster has the unexpected capacity to encode the temporal properties of intermittent odor signals. Each bORN is tuned to a specific range of stimulus intervals, and collectively bORNs can instantaneously encode a wide spectrum of intermittencies. Our theory argues for the existence of a novel peripheral mechanism for encoding the temporal pattern of odor that potentially serves as a neural substrate for olfactory scene analysis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, Center for Smell and Taste, McKnight Brain Institute, Department of Biology and Neuroscience, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 32611.
authors.forename: Il Memming
authors.initials: IM
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Yuriy V
authors.initials: YV
authors.lastname: Bobkov
authors.forename: Barry W
authors.initials: BW
authors.lastname: Ache
authors.forename: José C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Príncipe
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D008121:Nephropidae; D009812:Odorants; D009833:Olfactory Pathways / Q000502:physiology*; D018034:Olfactory Receptor Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D012903:Smell / Q000502:physiology*; D013379:Substrate Specificity
keywords: bursting olfactory receptor neuron; interval estimation; neural coding; olfactory scene analysis; point process; uncoupled oscillators