Abstract
We studied the electrophysiological activity of two classes of Drosophila melanogaster larval olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs), Or24a and Or74a, in response to 1 s stimulation with butanol, octanol, 2-heptanone, and propyl acetate. Each odour/OSN combination produced unique responses in terms of spike count and temporal profile. We used a classifier algorithm to explore the information content of OSN activity, and showed that as well as spike count, the activity of these OSNs included temporal information that enabled the classifier to accurately identify odours. The responses of OSNs during continuous odour exposure (5 and 20 min) showed that both types of neuron continued to respond, with no complete adaptation, and with no change to their ability to encode temporal information. Finally, we exposed larvae to octanol for 3 days and found only minor quantitative changes in OSN response to odours, indicating that the larval peripheral code is robust when faced with long-term exposure to odours, such as would be found in a natural context.
Highlights
Peripheral olfactory coding involves responses by olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) as part of a combinatorial code; in general, each OSN class responds to more than one odour, and each odour can activate more than one class of OSN [1]
We studied the electrophysiological activity of two classes of Drosophila melanogaster larval olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs), Or24a and Or74a, in response to 1 s stimulation with butanol, octanol, 2-heptanone, and propyl acetate
We studied the electrophysiological responses of the Drosophila melanogaster larva, which possesses only 21 pairs of unique OSNs housed in a pair of sensilla called the dorsal organs [11]
Summary
Peripheral olfactory coding involves responses by olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) as part of a combinatorial code; in general, each OSN class responds to more than one odour, and each odour can activate more than one class of OSN [1]. [2]) have focused on spike count to describe the responses of different OSN/odour combinations. To assess the accuracy of decoding based only on spike count information, for each trial–odour combination, the elements of the corresponding response vector were randomly shuffled. This destroyed any temporal structure of the spike train, but preserved the number of spikes inside the response time window. The decoding procedure was repeated using these shuffled data These analyses were repeated on a fixed time window (stimulus delivery period), comparing all possible pairs of odours.
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