In order to survive, animals often need to navigate a complex odor
landscape where odors can exist in airborne plumes. Several odor plume
properties change with distance from the odor source, providing potential
navigational cues to searching animals. Here, we focus on odor
intermittency, a temporal odor plume property that measures the fraction
of time odor is present at a given point within the plume and decreases
with increasing distance from the odor source. We sought to determine if
mice are capable of using changes in intermittency to locate an odor
source. To do so, we trained mice on an intermittency discrimination task.
We establish that mice can discriminate odor plume samples of low and high
intermittency and that the neural responses in the olfactory bulb can
account for task performance and support intermittency encoding.
Modulation of sniffing, a behavioral parameter that is highly dynamic
during odor-guided navigation, affects both behavioral outcomes on the
intermittency discrimination task as well as neural representation of
intermittency. Together, this work demonstrates that intermittency is an
odor plume property that can inform olfactory search and more broadly
supports the notion that mammalian odor-based navigation can be guided by
temporal odor plume properties.
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This content will become publicly available on March 5, 2025
Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittency
In order to survive, animals often need to navigate a complex odor landscape where odors can exist in airborne plumes. Several odor plume properties change with distance from the odor source, providing potential navigational cues to searching animals. Here, we focus on odor intermittency, a temporal odor plume property that measures the fraction of time odor is above a threshold at a given point within the plume and decreases with increasing distance from the odor source. We sought to determine if mice can use changes in intermittency to locate an odor source. To do so, we trained mice on an intermittency discrimination task. We establish that mice can discriminate odor plume samples of low and high intermittency and that the neural responses in the olfactory bulb can account for task performance and support intermittency encoding. Modulation of sniffing, a behavioral parameter that is highly dynamic during odor-guided navigation, affects both behavioral outcome on the intermittency discrimination task and neural representation of intermittency. Together, this work demonstrates that intermittency is an odor plume property that can inform olfactory search and more broadly supports the notion that mammalian odor-based navigation can be guided by temporal odor plume properties.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 2014217
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10505044
- Publisher / Repository:
- eLife
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- eLife
- Volume:
- 13
- ISSN:
- 2050-084X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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