Related papers: Adaptation of olfactory receptor abundances for ef…
Natural odors typically consist of many molecules at different concentrations. It is unclear how the numerous odorant molecules and their possible mixtures are discriminated by relatively few olfactory receptors. Using an…
The olfactory sense measures the chemical composition of the environment using a diverse array of olfactory receptors. In vertebrates, the olfactory receptors reside in a mucus layer in the nasal cavity and can thus only detect odorants…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
Understanding how molecular structure gives rise to odor perception remains a long-standing challenge, with ongoing debate over whether olfaction is primarily governed by molecular shape, vibrational properties, or their interplay at the…
It was observed before that due to convergence in the olfactory system a possible amplification can be as large as the degree of convergence. This is in the case when a single impulse from the converging inputs is enough to trigger the…
On the basis of the evident ability of neuronal olfactory systems to evaluate the intensity of an odorous stimulus and at the same time also recognise the identity of the odorant over a large range of concentrations, a few…
Multiple-objective optimization is common in biological systems. In the mammalian olfactory system, each sensory neuron stochastically expresses only one out of up to thousands of olfactory receptor (OR) gene alleles; at organism level the…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
It is known that if odors are presented to an olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) in a sub-threshold concentration -- i.e., when the average value of the number of the ORN bound receptor proteins (RPs) is insufficient for the generation of…
Cells often have tens of thousands of receptors, even though only a few activated receptors can trigger full cellular responses. Reasons for the overabundance of receptors remain unclear. We suggest that, in certain conditions, the large…
Olfactory systems use a small number of broadly sensitive receptors to combinatorially encode a vast number of odors. We propose a method of decoding such distributed representations by exploiting a statistical fact: receptors that do not…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
The reshaping and decorrelation of similar activity patterns by neuronal networks can enhance their discriminability, storage, and retrieval. How can such networks learn to decorrelate new complex patterns, as they arise in the olfactory…
Living systems continually respond to signals from the surrounding environment. Survival requires that their responses adapt quickly and robustly to the changes in the environment. One particularly challenging example is olfactory…
The olfactory system removes correlations in natural odors using a network of inhibitory neurons in the olfactory bulb. It has been proposed that this network integrates the response from all olfactory receptors and inhibits them equally.…
In color vision, the quantitative rules for mixing lights to make a target color are well understood. By contrast, the rules for mixing odorants to make a target odor remain elusive. A solution to this problem in vision relied on…
Sensory systems across all modalities and species exhibit adaptation to continuously changing input statistics. Individual neurons have been shown to modulate their response gains so as to maximize information transmission in different…
We present a model for olfactory coding based on spatial representation of glomerular responses. In this model distinct odorants activate specific subsets of glomeruli, dependent upon the odorant's chemical identity and concentration. The…
Selectivity of olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) is compared with that of its receptor proteins (R) with fluctuations of odor binding-releasing process taken into account. The binding-releasing process is modeled as N Bernoulli trials, where…
It has been discovered before (arXiv:2306.07676) that for the selectivity gain due to fluctuations in the process of primary odor reception by olfactory receptor neuron (ORN) there exists an optimal concentration of odors at which increased…