הרצאת אורח של ד"ר משה פרנס במחלקה להנדסה ביו רפואית

Dr. Moshe Parnas

Sackler Faculty of Medicine and Sagol School of Neuroscience

 Tel Aviv University

From sensory neural codes to behavior

Taking advantage of the well-characterized olfactory system of Drosophila, we derive a simple quantitative relationship between patterns of odorant receptor activation, the resulting internal representations of odors, and odor discrimination. Second-order excitatory and inhibitory projection neurons (ePNs and iPNs) convey olfactory information to the lateral horn, a brain region implicated in innate odor-driven behaviors. We show that the distance between ePN activity patterns is the main determinant of a fly’s spontaneous discrimination behavior. Manipulations that silence subsets of ePNs have graded behavioral consequences, with effect sizes predicted by changes in ePN distances. ePN distances only predict innate, not learned, behavior because the latter engages the mushroom body, which enables differentiated responses even to very similar odors. Inhibition from iPNs, which scales with olfactory stimulus strength, enhances innate discrimination of closely related odors, by imposing a high-pass filter on transmitter release from ePN terminals that increases the distance between odor representations.

ההרצאה תתקיים ביום ראשון 01.01.17, בשעה 15:00

בחדר 315, הבניין הרב תחומי, אוניברסיטת תל אביב