Person: Rokni, Dan
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Rokni
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Rokni, Dan
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Publication Analysis and Synthesis in Olfaction(American Chemical Society, 2014) Rokni, Dan; Murthy, VenkateshNatural environments contain numerous volatile compounds emanating from a large number of sources, and the survival of many animals depends on their ability to segregate odors of interest within complex odorous scenes. In a recent paper, we described how the ability of mice to detect odors within mixtures depends on the chemical structure and neural representation of the target and background odorants.Publication An Olfactory Cocktail Party: Figure-Ground Segregation of Odorants in Rodents(Nature Publishing Group, 2014) Rokni, Dan; Hemmelder, Vivian; Kapoor, Vikrant; Murthy, VenkateshIn odorant-rich environments, animals must be able to detect specific odorants of interest against variable backgrounds. However, studies have found that both humans and rodents are poor at analyzing the components of odorant mixtures, suggesting that olfaction is a synthetic sense in which mixtures are perceived holistically. We found that mice could be easily trained to detect target odorants embedded in unpredictable and variable mixtures. To relate the behavioral performance to neural representation, we imaged the responses of olfactory bulb glomeruli to individual odors in mice expressing the \(Ca^{2+}\) indicator GCaMP3 in olfactory receptor neurons. The difficulty of segregating the target from the background depended strongly on the extent of overlap between the glomerular responses to target and background odors. Our study indicates that the olfactory system has powerful analytic abilities that are constrained by the limits of combinatorial neural representation of odorants at the level of the olfactory receptors.