by Keyword: Olfactory coding
Auffarth, Benjamin, Gutierrez, Agustin, Marco, Santiago, (2011). Statistical analysis of coding for molecular properties in the olfactory bulb Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 5, (62), 1-8
The relationship between molecular properties of odorants and neural activities is arguably one of the most important issues in olfaction and the rules governing this relationship are still not clear. In the olfactory bulb (OB), glomeruli relay olfactory information to second-order neurons which in turn project to cortical areas. We investigate relevance of odorant properties, spatial localization of glomerular coding sites, and size of coding zones in a dataset of 2-deoxyglucose images of glomeruli over the entire OB of the rat. We relate molecular properties to activation of glomeruli in the OB using a nonparametric statistical test and a support-vector machine classification study. Our method permits to systematically map the topographic representation of various classes of odorants in the OB. Our results suggest many localized coding sites for particular molecular properties and some molecular properties that could form the basis for a spatial map of olfactory information. We found that alkynes, alkanes, alkenes, and amines affect activation maps very strongly as compared to other properties and that amines, sulfur-containing compounds, and alkynes have small zones and high relevance to activation changes, while aromatics, alkanes, and carboxylics acid recruit very big zones in the dataset. Results suggest a local spatial encoding for molecular properties.
JTD Keywords: Molecular-receptive range, Odor, Olfactory bulb, Olfactory coding, Property-activity relationship, Structure-odor relationship
Auffarth, B., Gutierrez-Galvez, A., Marco, S., (2010). Relevance and LOCI of odorant features in the rat olfactory bulb: Statistical methods for understanding olfactory codes in glomerular images BIOSIGNALS 2010 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Bio-inpsired Systems and Signal Processing, Proceedings 
3rd International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing, BIOSIGNALS 2010 (ed. Fred, A., Filipe, J., Gamboa, H.), Springer-Verlag (Valencia, Spain) , 37-44
The relationship between physicochemical properties of odor molecules and perceived odor quality is arguably one of the most important issues in olfaction and the rules governing this relationship remain unknown. Any given odor molecule will stimulate more than one type of receptor in the nose, perhaps hundreds, and this stimulation reflects itself in the neural code of the olfactory nervous system. We present a method to investigate neural coding at the glomerular level of the olfactory bulb, the first relay for olfactory processing in the brain. Our results give insights into localization of coding sites, relevance of odorant properties for information processing, and the size of coding zones.
JTD Keywords: Classification, Glomeruli, Non-parametric statistics, Odorants, Olfactory bulb, Olfactory coding, Property-activity relationship
Falasconi, M., Gutierrez, A., Auffarth, B., Sberveglieri, G., Marco, S., (2009). Cluster analysis of the rat olfactory bulb activity in response to different odorants Olfaction and Electronic Nose: Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Olfaction and Electronic Nose 13th International Symposium on Olfaction and the Electronic Nose (ed. Pardo, M., Sberveglieri, G.), Amer Inst Physics (Brescia, Italy) 1137, 169-172
With the goal of deepen in the understanding of coding of chemical information in the olfactory system, a large data set consisting of rat's olfactory bulb activity values in response to several different volatile compounds has been analyzed by fuzzy c-means clustering methods. Clustering should help to discover groups of glomeruli that are similary activated according to their response profiles across the odorants. To investigate the significance of the achieved fuzzy partitions we developed and applied a novel validity approach based on cluster stability. Our results show certain level of glomerular clustering in the olfactory bulb and indicate that exist a main chemo-topic subdivision of the glomerular layer in few macro-area which are rather specific to particular functional groups of the volatile molecules.
JTD Keywords: Olfactory bulb, 2-deoxyglucose mapping, Olfactory coding, Cluster analysis, Cluster validity
