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Main Menu - Block
- Overview
- Anatomy and Histology
- Cryo-Electron Microscopy
- Electron Microscopy
- Flow Cytometry
- Gene Targeting and Transgenics
- Immortalized Cell Line Culture
- Integrative Imaging
- Invertebrate Shared Resource
- Janelia Experimental Technology
- Mass Spectrometry
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- Molecular Genomics
- Primary & iPS Cell Culture
- Project Pipeline Support
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Note: Research in this publication was not performed at Janelia.
Abstract
Odor representation in the olfactory bulb (OB) undergoes a transformation from a combinatorial glomerular map to a distributed mitral/tufted (M/T) cell code. To understand this transformation, we analyzed the odor representation in large populations of individual M/T cells in the Xenopus OB. The spontaneous [Ca(2+)] activities of M/T cells appeared to be irregular, but there were groups of spatially distributed neurons showing synchronized [Ca(2+)] activities. These neurons were always connected to the same glomerulus. Odorants elicited complex spatiotemporal response patterns in M/T cells where nearby neurons generally showed little correlation. But the responses of neurons connected to the same glomerulus were virtually identical, irrespective of whether the responses were excitatory or inhibitory, and independent of the distance between them. Synchronous neurons received correlated EPSCs and were coupled by electrical conductances that could account for the correlated responses. Thus, at the output stage of the OB, odors are represented by modules of distributed and synchronous M/T cells associated with the same glomeruli. This allows for parallel input to higher brain centers.