Antagonistic odor interactions in olfactory sensory neurons are widespread in freely breathing mice

• DOI: 10.1101/847525
• Publication Date: 2019-11-20T15:55:15Z
• Authors: Joseph D. Zak; Gautam Reddy; Massimo Vergassola; Venkatesh N. Murthy
• Keywords: Stimulus (psychology)

Abstract Odor landscapes contain complex blends of discrete molecules that each activate unique, overlapping populations olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs). Despite the presence hundreds OSN subtypes in many animals, nature odor inputs may lead to saturation neural responses at early stages stimulus encoding. Information loss due could be mitigated by normalizing mechanisms such as antagonism level receptor-ligand interactions, whose existence and prevalence remains uncertain. By imaging axon terminals bulb glomeruli well cell bodies within epithelium freely breathing mice, we found widespread antagonistic interactions binary mixtures. In mixtures up 12 odorants, became stronger more prevalent with increasing mixture complexity. Therefore, is a remarkably common feature encoding helps activity reduce saturation.