TY - JOUR
T1 - Dynamics of odor sampling strategies in mice
AU - Reisert, Johannes
AU - Golden, Glen J.
AU - Dibattista, Michele
AU - Gelperin, Alan
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the U. S. Army Research Office under grant number W911NF-11-1-0087 to AG and by National Institutes of Health grants to JR (R01DC016647 and R01DC009613). MD is supported by a Rita Levi-Montalcini Award from the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research (DM100915_685). Genotyping and mouse surgery were performed at the Monell Genotyping and DNA/RNA Analysis and The Behavioral and Physiological Phenotyping Cores, which were supported, in part, by funding from the NIH-NIDCD Core Grant 1P30DC011735-01 and also from grant G20OD020296 (infrastructure improvement at the Monell Chemical Senses Center). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright: © 2020 Reisert et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2020/8
Y1 - 2020/8
N2 - Mammalian olfactory receptor neurons in the nasal cavity are stimulated by odorants carried by the inhaled air and their activation is therefore tied to and driven by the breathing or sniffing frequency. Sniffing frequency can be deliberately modulated to alter how odorants stimulate olfactory receptor neurons, giving the animal control over the frequency of odorant exposure to potentially aid odorant detection and discrimination. We monitored sniffing behaviors and odorant discrimination ability of freely-moving mice while they sampled either decreasing concentrations of target odorants or sampled a fixed target odorant concentration in the presence of a background of increasing odorant concentrations, using a Go-NoGo behavioral paradigm. This allowed us to ask how mice alter their odorant sampling duration and sampling (sniffing) frequency depending on the demands of the task and its difficulty. Mice showed an anticipatory increase in sniffing rate prior to odorant exposure and chose to sample for longer durations when exposed to odorants as compared to the solvent control odorant. Similarly, mice also took more odorant sampling sniffs when exposed to target odorants compared to the solvent control odorant. In general, odorant sampling strategies became more similar the more difficult the task was, e.g. the lower the target odorant concentration or the lower the target odorant contrast relative to the background odorant, suggesting that sniffing patterns are not preset, but are dynamically modulated by the particular task and its difficulty.
AB - Mammalian olfactory receptor neurons in the nasal cavity are stimulated by odorants carried by the inhaled air and their activation is therefore tied to and driven by the breathing or sniffing frequency. Sniffing frequency can be deliberately modulated to alter how odorants stimulate olfactory receptor neurons, giving the animal control over the frequency of odorant exposure to potentially aid odorant detection and discrimination. We monitored sniffing behaviors and odorant discrimination ability of freely-moving mice while they sampled either decreasing concentrations of target odorants or sampled a fixed target odorant concentration in the presence of a background of increasing odorant concentrations, using a Go-NoGo behavioral paradigm. This allowed us to ask how mice alter their odorant sampling duration and sampling (sniffing) frequency depending on the demands of the task and its difficulty. Mice showed an anticipatory increase in sniffing rate prior to odorant exposure and chose to sample for longer durations when exposed to odorants as compared to the solvent control odorant. Similarly, mice also took more odorant sampling sniffs when exposed to target odorants compared to the solvent control odorant. In general, odorant sampling strategies became more similar the more difficult the task was, e.g. the lower the target odorant concentration or the lower the target odorant contrast relative to the background odorant, suggesting that sniffing patterns are not preset, but are dynamically modulated by the particular task and its difficulty.
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U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0237756
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0237756
M3 - Article
C2 - 32797072
AN - SCOPUS:85089519147
SN - 1932-6203
VL - 15
JO - PloS one
JF - PloS one
IS - 8 August
M1 - e0237756
ER -