Control of mitral/tufted cell output by selective inhibition among olfactory bulb glomeruli

Inhibition is fundamental to information processing by neural circuits. In the olfactory bulb (OB), glomeruli are the functional units for odor information coding, but inhibition among glomeruli is poorly characterized. We used two-photon calcium imaging in anesthetized and awake mice to visualize both odorant-evoked excitation and suppression in OB output neurons (mitral and tufted, MT cells). MT cell response polarity mapped uniformly to discrete OB glomeruli, allowing us to analyze how inhibition shapes OB output relative to the glomerular map. Odorants elicited unique patterns of suppression in only a subset of glomeruli in which such suppression could be detected, and excited and suppressed glomeruli were spatially intermingled. Binary mixture experiments revealed that interglomerular inhibition could suppress excitatory mitral cell responses to odorants. These results reveal that inhibitory OB circuits nonlinearly transform odor representations and support a model of selective and nonrandom inhibition among glomerular ensembles.We thank Tom Bozza for providing the M72-ChR2 mouse line used in the Supplemental Information and for advice on odorant panels. We also thank Christine Zabawa, Jackson Ball, and Thomas Rust for technical assistance; Markus Rothermel, Daniela Brunert, Marta Diaz-Quesada, Thomas Eiting, Yusuke Tsuno, Isaac Youngstrom, and Andrew Moran for sharing materials and expertise; and Fernando Fernandez, Michael Shipley, and M.W. lab members for helpful discussion and comments on the manuscript. Funding was provided by NIH (R01 DC06441 to M.W. and F32 DC012718 to M.N.E.) and the University of Utah Office of Undergraduate Research (to K.R.H.). (R01 DC06441 - NIH; F32 DC012718 - NIH; University of Utah Office of Undergraduate Research)Accepted manuscrip

Illuminating Vertebrate Olfactory Processing

The olfactory system encodes information about molecules by spatiotemporal patterns of activity across distributed populations of neurons and extracts information from these patterns to control specific behaviors. Recent studies used in vivo recordings, optogenetics, and other methods to analyze the mechanisms by which odor information is encoded and processed in the olfactory system, the functional connectivity within and between olfactory brain areas, and the impact of spatiotemporal patterning of neuronal activity on higher-order neurons and behavioral outputs. The results give rise to a faceted picture of olfactory processing and provide insights into fundamental mechanisms underlying neuronal computations. This review focuses on some of this work presented in a Mini-Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2012.Molecular and Cellular Biolog

Mapping odorant sensitivities reveals a sparse but structured representation of olfactory chemical space by sensory input to the mouse olfactory bulb

© 2022, Burton et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/In olfactory systems, convergence of sensory neurons onto glomeruli generates a map of odorant receptor identity. How glomerular maps relate to sensory space remains unclear. We sought to better characterize this relationship in the mouse olfactory system by defining glomeruli in terms of the odorants to which they are most sensitive. Using high-throughput odorant delivery and ultrasensitive imaging of sensory inputs, we imaged responses to 185 odorants presented at concentrations determined to activate only one or a few glomeruli across the dorsal olfactory bulb. The resulting datasets defined the tuning properties of glomeruli - and, by inference, their cognate odorant receptors - in a low-concentration regime, and yielded consensus maps of glomerular sensitivity across a wide range of chemical space. Glomeruli were extremely narrowly tuned, with ~25% responding to only one odorant, and extremely sensitive, responding to their effective odorants at sub-picomolar to nanomolar concentrations. Such narrow tuning in this concentration regime allowed for reliable functional identification of many glomeruli based on a single diagnostic odorant. At the same time, the response spectra of glomeruli responding to multiple odorants was best predicted by straightforward odorant structural features, and glomeruli sensitive to distinct odorants with common structural features were spatially clustered. These results define an underlying structure to the primary representation of sensory space by the mouse olfactory system.Peer reviewe

Rapid Encoding and Perception of Novel Odors in the Rat

To gain insight into which parameters of neural activity are important in shaping the perception of odors, we combined a behavioral measure of odor perception with optical imaging of odor representations at the level of receptor neuron input to the rat olfactory bulb. Instead of the typical test of an animal's ability to discriminate two familiar odorants by exhibiting an operant response, we used a spontaneously expressed response to a novel odorant—exploratory sniffing—as a measure of odor perception. This assay allowed us to measure the speed with which rats perform spontaneous odor discriminations. With this paradigm, rats discriminated and began responding to a novel odorant in as little as 140 ms. This time is comparable to that measured in earlier studies using operant behavioral readouts after extensive training. In a subset of these trials, we simultaneously imaged receptor neuron input to the dorsal olfactory bulb with near-millisecond temporal resolution as the animal sampled and then responded to the novel odorant. The imaging data revealed that the bulk of the discrimination time can be attributed to the peripheral events underlying odorant detection: receptor input arrives at the olfactory bulb 100–150 ms after inhalation begins, leaving only 50–100 ms for central processing and response initiation. In most trials, odor discrimination had occurred even before the initial barrage of receptor neuron firing had ceased and before spatial maps of activity across glomeruli had fully developed. These results suggest a coding strategy in which the earliest-activated glomeruli play a major role in the initial perception of odor quality, and place constraints on coding and processing schemes based on simple changes in spike rate

Inhalation frequency controls reformatting of mitral/tufted cell odor representations in the olfactory bulb

In mammals, olfactory sensation depends on inhalation, which controls activation of sensory neurons and temporal patterning of central activity. Odor representations by mitral and tufted (MT) cells, the main output from the olfactory bulb (OB), reflect sensory input as well as excitation and inhibition from OB circuits, which may change as sniff frequency increases. To test the impact of sampling frequency on MT cell odor responses, we obtained whole-cell recordings from MT cells in anesthetized male and female mice while varying inhalation frequency via tracheotomy, allowing comparison of inhalation-linked responses across cells. We characterized frequency effects on MT cell responses during inhalation of air and odorants using inhalation pulses and also "playback" of sniffing recorded from awake mice. Inhalation-linked changes in membrane potential were well predicted across frequency from linear convolution of 1 Hz responses; and, as frequency increased, near-identical temporal responses could emerge from depolarizing, hyperpolarizing, or multiphasic MT responses. However, net excitation was not well predicted from 1 Hz responses and varied substantially across MT cells, with some cells increasing and others decreasing in spike rate. As a result, sustained odorant sampling at higher frequencies led to increasing decorrelation of the MT cell population response pattern over time. Bulk activation of sensory inputs by optogenetic stimulation affected MT cells more uniformly across frequency, suggesting that frequency-dependent decorrelation emerges from odor-specific patterns of activity in the OB network. These results suggest that sampling behavior alone can reformat early sensory representations, possibly to optimize sensory perception during repeated sampling.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Olfactory sensation in mammals depends on inhalation, which increases in frequency during active sampling of olfactory stimuli. We asked how inhalation frequency can shape the neural coding of odor information by recording from projection neurons of the olfactory bulb while artificially varying odor sampling frequency in the anesthetized mouse. We found that sampling an odor at higher frequencies led to diverse changes in net responsiveness, as measured by action potential output, that were not predicted from low-frequency responses. These changes led to a reorganization of the pattern of neural activity evoked by a given odorant that occurred preferentially during sustained, high-frequency inhalation. These results point to a novel mechanism for modulating early sensory representations solely as a function of sampling behavior.This work was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants DC06441 and DC013076. We thank C. Zabawa and J. Ball for technical support; J. Fernandez, J. White, and A. Schaefer for advice on recordings; M.W. laboratory members for helpful comments on the manuscript; and D. Wesson for collecting the intranasal pressure data from awake mice. (DC06441 - National Institutes of Health; DC013076 - National Institutes of Health)Published versio

Representation of odorants by receptor neuron input to the mouse olfactory bulb

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2001. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B. V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Neuron 32 (2001): 723-735, doi:10.1016/S0896-6273(01)00506-2.To visualize odorant representations by receptor neuron input to the mouse olfactory bulb, we loaded receptor neurons with calcium-sensitive dye and imaged odorant-evoked responses from their axon terminals. Fluorescence increases reflected activation of receptor neuron populations converging onto individual glomeruli. We report several findings. First, five glomeruli were identifiable across animals based on their location and odorant responsiveness; all five showed complex response specificities. Second, maps of input were chemotopically organized at near-threshold concentrations but, at moderate concentrations, involved many widely distributed glomeruli. Third, the dynamic range of input to a glomerulus was greater than that reported for individual receptor neurons. Finally, odorant activation slopes could differ across glomeruli, and for different odorants activating the same glomerulus. These results imply a high degree of complexity in odorant representations at the level of olfactory bulb input.This work was supported by NIH NS08437-DC05259 and DC00378-03