2012/12/21 by Anneke Meyer, Meyer, Anneke, Giovanni Galizia +4
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Neuroscience · #FOS: Biological sciences #Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior #Neurobiology and Insect Physiology Research #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #Plant and animal studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1212.5619
openalex publication_date 2012/12/21 · openalex created_date 2022/10/01 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Local computation in microcircuits is an essential feature of distributed\ninformation processing in vertebrate and invertebrate brains. The insect\nantennal lobe represents a spatially confined local network that processes\nhigh-dimensional and redundant peripheral input to compute an efficient odor\ncode. Social insects can rely on a particularly rich olfactory receptor\nrepertoire and they exhibit complex odor-guided behaviors. This corresponds\nwith a high anatomical complexity of their AL network. In the honeybee, a large\nnumber of glomeruli that receive sensory input are interconnected by a dense\nnetwork of local interneurons (LNs). Uniglomerular projection neurons (PNs)\nintegrate sensory and recurrent network input into an efficient spatio-temporal\nodor code. To investigate the specific computational roles of LNs and PNs we\nmeasured eleven features of sub- and suprathreshold single cell responses to in\nvivo odor stimulation. Using a semi-supervised cluster analysis we identified a\ncombination of five characteristic features that enabled the accurate\nseparation of morphologically identified LNs and PNs. The two clusters differed\nsignificantly in all five features. In the absence of stimulation PNs showed a\nhigher subthreshold activation, assumed higher peak response rates and more\nregular spiking pattern. LNs reacted considerably faster to the onset of a\nstimulus and their responses were more reliable across stimulus repetitions. We\ndiscuss possible mechanisms that can explain our results, and we interpret\ncell-type specific characteristics with respect to their functional relevance.\n