Temporally complex odour information encoding

Introduction

A fundamental challenge for the brain is to extract relevant information from an ever-changing external world. Natural odours are in a constant state of flux. Turbulent airflow shapes odours into spatiotemporally complex plumes that carry information about the olfactory scenery and provide vital clues about the location of, for example, food sources or predators. How the mammalian olfactory system extracts information about space from temporal odour dynamics, however, is still not well understood.

Methodological Advances

Recent methodological advances in presenting dynamic odour stimuli, neural activity recordings, and machine-vision algorithms now offer the exciting opportunity to address this fundamental question. Using a multidisciplinary approach, this project will uncover how temporally complex odour information is processed across the olfactory system and how odour dynamics give rise to behaviour.

Research Objectives

1. Investigation of Odour Representation
   We will first investigate how temporally complex odour information is represented across key structures of the mammalian olfactory system using in vivo physiology. This will provide important groundwork for the next step.

2. Elucidation of Encoding Mechanisms
   The next step involves elucidating the cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying the encoding of dynamic odours in the early olfactory system.

3. Study of Navigation Behaviour
   Finally, we will study which features of temporally complex odours are used for navigation behaviour by simultaneously recording and correlating:

   • The animal’s respiration sampling strategy
   • The dynamic odour profile encountered by the animal
   • Neural activity from early and higher-order olfactory areas in freely moving mice.

Conclusion

By combining cellular and systems neuroscience with behavioural investigations, we aim to directly assess how mammals use olfaction to extract information about space from time. I strongly believe that this innovative research programme will generate novel and highly generalizable insights into how naturalistic sensory information is processed and that it will uncover neural mechanisms that give rise to our perception of the world.