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Free keywords:
Action Potentials
Animals
Biological Clocks/*physiology
Dendrites/physiology
Excitatory Postsynaptic Potentials/physiology
Female
Grasshoppers/*physiology
Male
Models, Neurological
Mushroom Bodies/*physiology
Nerve Net/physiology
Neurons/*physiology
Odorants
Sense Organs/*physiology
Smell/*physiology
Time Factors
Abstract:
In the insect olfactory system the antennal lobe generates oscillatory synchronization of its output as a framework for coincidence detection by its target, the mushroom body (MB). The intrinsic neurons of the MB (Kenyon cells, KCs) are thus a good model system in which to investigate the functional relevance of oscillations and neural synchronization. We combine electrophysiological and modeling approaches to examine how intrinsic and circuit properties might contribute to the preference of KCs for coincident input and how their decoding of olfactory information is affected by the absence of oscillatory synchronization in their input. We show that voltage-dependent subthreshold properties of KCs bring about a supralinear summation of their inputs, favoring responses to coincident EPSPs. Abolishing oscillatory synchronization weakens the preference of KCs for coincident input and causes a large reduction in their odor specificity. Finally, we find that a decoding strategy that is based on coincidence detection enhances both noise tolerance and input discriminability by KCs.
