Associate Provost for Research Boston University Medical Campus
NIDCD - National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders	Research Resources

Abstract

Abstract: DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The long-term goal of this research is to understand how the olfactory system encodes information about odors. In the olfactory bulb, where sensory input is first processed, olfactory information is encoded, at least in part, by spatially organized patterns of neural activity. Experiments that visualize the input to olfactory bulb glomeruli have revealed that these spatial patterns are also temporally dynamic. Temporal patterns of sensory input to glomeruli are concentration-dependent, odor-specific, and stereotyped across animals. This novel finding has important implications for considering odor-coding strategies in the bulb. The proposed experiments will investigate how the dynamics of glomerular activity shape how odor information is encoded and processed. The experiments will image activity in receptor neurons and mitral cells to 1) characterize how patterns of glomerular activity change during the time-course of odor sampling, and 2) characterize how these patterns are transformed from the level of sensory input to the level of mitral cell output from the bulb. The experiments should improve our understanding of odor coding strategies, and the role of the olfactory bulb in shaping this code. Understanding how the brain encodes and processes sensory information could be important in the treatment of olfactory or other sensory deficits.

Thesaurus Terms:
neural information processing, odor, olfactory lobe
chemoreceptor, neurophysiology, olfaction, sensory mechanism
laboratory mouse, microscopy

Institution:	BOSTON UNIVERSITY
	881 COMMONWEALTH AVENUE
	BOSTON, MA 02215
Fiscal Year:	2007
Department:	BIOLOGY
Project Start:	22-JAN-2004
Project End:	31-DEC-2008
ICD:	NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DEAFNESS AND OTHER COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
IRG:	IFCN