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Main Authors: Choi, Kiri, Rosenbluth, Will, Graf, Isabella R., Kadakia, Nirag, Emonet, Thierry
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20135
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author Choi, Kiri
Rosenbluth, Will
Graf, Isabella R.
Kadakia, Nirag
Emonet, Thierry
author_facet Choi, Kiri
Rosenbluth, Will
Graf, Isabella R.
Kadakia, Nirag
Emonet, Thierry
contents 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 navigation in turbulent plumes, where animals experience highly intermittent odor signals while odor concentration varies over many length- and timescales. Here, we show theoretically that Drosophila olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) can exploit proximity to a bifurcation point of their firing dynamics to reliably extract information about the timing and intensity of fluctuations in the odor signal, which have been shown to be critical for odor-guided navigation. Close to the bifurcation, the system is intrinsically invariant to signal variance, and information about the timing, duration, and intensity of odor fluctuations is transferred efficiently. Importantly, we find that proximity to the bifurcation is maintained by mean adaptation alone and therefore does not require any additional feedback mechanism or fine-tuning. Using a biophysical model with calcium-based feedback, we demonstrate that this mechanism can explain the measured adaptation characteristics of Drosophila ORNs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_20135
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bifurcation enhances temporal information encoding in the olfactory periphery
Choi, Kiri
Rosenbluth, Will
Graf, Isabella R.
Kadakia, Nirag
Emonet, Thierry
Neurons and Cognition
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 navigation in turbulent plumes, where animals experience highly intermittent odor signals while odor concentration varies over many length- and timescales. Here, we show theoretically that Drosophila olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) can exploit proximity to a bifurcation point of their firing dynamics to reliably extract information about the timing and intensity of fluctuations in the odor signal, which have been shown to be critical for odor-guided navigation. Close to the bifurcation, the system is intrinsically invariant to signal variance, and information about the timing, duration, and intensity of odor fluctuations is transferred efficiently. Importantly, we find that proximity to the bifurcation is maintained by mean adaptation alone and therefore does not require any additional feedback mechanism or fine-tuning. Using a biophysical model with calcium-based feedback, we demonstrate that this mechanism can explain the measured adaptation characteristics of Drosophila ORNs.
title Bifurcation enhances temporal information encoding in the olfactory periphery
topic Neurons and Cognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20135