Odor trail tracking by rats in surface and air borne conditions

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Odor trail tracking by rats in surface and air borne conditions Adil Khan1*, Urvashi Raheja1 and Upinder Bhalla1 1 National Centre for Biological Sciences, India Rats, being nocturnal, rely heavily on their sense of smell. They have long been known to be proficient at odor-based tasks in the lab. Precise measurements by ours and other groups have revealed abilities to both identify and localize odors within the timescale of a single sniff (~150ms). They have also been known to be capable of locating food in large arenas such as households and fields. These feats presumably use air-borne and surface borne odor trails. We have attempted to study the nature of this trail tracking in both these conditions. In this process we have tried to establish behavioral methods which study odor guided navigation in more natural behavioral tasks yet with well controlled stimulus conditions. To study surface borne odor tracking, we constructed a treadmill which had a sheet of paper as the running surface. The paper had an odor trail in the form of a chocolate piece rubbed in a meandering line on the paper. Rats learned to track this trail while running on the treadmill. Video analysis which tracked their nose movement revealed their tracking strategies. Since this primary task provides visual and tactile cues also, the task was compared to a condition with purely odor cues also. To study air borne plume tracking, we built an arena where rats were trained to locate the source of an air borne odor emerging from one of multiple compartments. Rats learnt this task and showed a range of different localization strategies. We further characterized the nature and degree of laminarity of the odor plume, and correlated different plume characteristics with different strategies used by the rats. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session III Citation: Khan A, Raheja U and Bhalla U (2010). Odor trail tracking by rats in surface and air borne conditions. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00275 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 05 Mar 2010; Published Online: 05 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Adil Khan, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Banglore, India, adil@ncbs.res.in Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla Google Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla Google Scholar Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla PubMed Adil Khan Urvashi Raheja Upinder Bhalla Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.