Innate versus learned odour processing in the mouse olfactory bulb

Ko Kobayakawa, Reiko Kobayakawa, Hideyuki Matsumoto, Yuichiro Oka, Takeshi Imai, Masahito Ikawa, Masaru Okabe, Toshio Ikeda, Shigeyoshi Itohara, Takefumi Kikusui, Kensaku Mori and Hitoshi Sakano ()
Additional contact information
Ko Kobayakawa: Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo
Reiko Kobayakawa: Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo
Hideyuki Matsumoto: Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo
Yuichiro Oka: Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo
Takeshi Imai: Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo
Masahito Ikawa: Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, The Osaka University
Masaru Okabe: Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, The Osaka University
Toshio Ikeda: Laboratory for Behavioral Genetics, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
Shigeyoshi Itohara: Laboratory for Behavioral Genetics, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
Takefumi Kikusui: Laboratory of Veterinary Ethology, The University of Tokyo
Kensaku Mori: Graduate School of Medicine, The University of Tokyo
Hitoshi Sakano: Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo

Nature, 2007, vol. 450, issue 7169, 503-508

Abstract: Abstract The mammalian olfactory system mediates various responses, including aversive behaviours to spoiled foods and fear responses to predator odours. In the olfactory bulb, each glomerulus represents a single species of odorant receptor. Because a single odorant can interact with several different receptor species, the odour information received in the olfactory epithelium is converted to a topographical map of multiple glomeruli activated in distinct areas in the olfactory bulb. To study how the odour map is interpreted in the brain, we generated mutant mice in which olfactory sensory neurons in a specific area of the olfactory epithelium are ablated by targeted expression of the diphtheria toxin gene. Here we show that, in dorsal-zone-depleted mice, the dorsal domain of the olfactory bulb was devoid of glomerular structures, although second-order neurons were present in the vacant areas. The mutant mice lacked innate responses to aversive odorants, even though they were capable of detecting them and could be conditioned for aversion with the remaining glomeruli. These results indicate that, in mice, aversive information is received in the olfactory bulb by separate sets of glomeruli, those dedicated for innate and those for learned responses.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06281 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nature:v:450:y:2007:i:7169:d:10.1038_nature06281

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

DOI: 10.1038/nature06281

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

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