Related papers: Trade-off between sensitivity and selectivity in o…
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 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…
Olfactory receptor usage is highly heterogeneous, with some receptor types being orders of magnitude more abundant than others. We propose an explanation for this striking fact: the receptor distribution is tuned to maximally represent…
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…
A mechanism is proposed for increasing selectivity of olfactory bulb projection neurons as compared to the olfactory receptor neurons, which could operate under low odor concentration, when the lateral inhibition mechanism becomes…
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…
Multivalency is prevalent in various biological systems and applications due to the superselectivity that arises from the cooperativity of multivalent binding. Traditionally, it was thought that weaker individual binding would improve the…
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…
Most sensory cells use surface receptors to detect environmental stimuli and initiate downstream signaling. Cooperative interactions among sensory receptors is known to play a crucial role in enhancing the sensitivity of biochemical…
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.…
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…
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…
Our sense of smell relies on sensitive, selective atomic-scale processes that are initiated when a scent molecule meets specific receptors in the nose. However, the physical mechanisms of detection are not clear. While odorant shape and…
Cooperativity arising from local interactions in equilibrium receptor systems provides gain, but does not increase sensory performance, as measured by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to a fundamental tradeoff between gain and intrinsic…
In complex systems, we often observe complex global behavior emerge from a collection of agents interacting with each other in their environment, with each individual agent acting only on locally available information, without knowing the…
We present two sensitivity function trade-offs that apply to a class of networks with a string topology. In particular we show that a lower bound on the H-infinity norm and a Bode sensitivity relation hold for an entire family of…
In vertebrates, olfactory sensory neurons choose only one olfactory receptor to produce out of ~2000 possibilities. The mechanism for how this singular receptor expression occurs is unknown. Here we propose a mechanism that can…
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…
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…
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…