Antagonistic odor interactions in olfactory sensory neurons are widespread in freely breathing mice

Joseph D. Zak (), Gautam Reddy, Massimo Vergassola and Venkatesh N. Murthy ()
Additional contact information
Joseph D. Zak: Harvard University
Gautam Reddy: Harvard University
Massimo Vergassola: ENS, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris
Venkatesh N. Murthy: Harvard University

Nature Communications, 2020, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Odor landscapes contain complex blends of molecules that each activate unique, overlapping populations of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). Despite the presence of hundreds of OSN subtypes in many animals, the overlapping nature of odor inputs may lead to saturation of neural responses at the early stages of stimulus encoding. Information loss due to saturation could be mitigated by normalizing mechanisms such as antagonism at the level of receptor-ligand interactions, whose existence and prevalence remains uncertain. By imaging OSN axon terminals in olfactory bulb glomeruli as well as OSN cell bodies within the olfactory epithelium in freely breathing mice, we find widespread antagonistic interactions in binary odor mixtures. In complex mixtures of up to 12 odorants, antagonistic interactions are stronger and more prevalent with increasing mixture complexity. Therefore, antagonism is a common feature of odor mixture encoding in OSNs and helps in normalizing activity to reduce saturation and increase information transfer.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17124-5 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:11:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-020-17124-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17124-5

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().