Olfactory cocktail party
Brilliant work
Venkatesh Murthy from Harvard talking at #UIceland
#harvard #mice #olfaction #cocktailParty
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3775
"On smelling your way to the fruit with ring models" – a podcast featuring Katherine Nagel.
"Rapid temporal processing in the olfactory bulb underlies concentration-invariant odor identification and signal decorrelation", Karadas et al. 2026 (Dima Rinberg's lab).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02250-y
Circuits in the mouse olfactory bulb implement a rapid filter:
"Animals who rely on smell need to identify and discriminate odors despite fluctuations in concentration, yet odor receptor activation is strongly concentration dependent. [...] We found that the glomeruli [...] activated earliest in a sniff robustly represented odor identity across concentrations, ... . [via] a short temporal window of excitability at a sniff’s onset, followed by prolonged odor-evoked inhibition. The OB implements a rapid temporal filter, which is responsible for stabilizing identity across concentrations while decorrelating responses between odors."
This study shows that the brain’s smell center uses precise timing and inhibition to read out early odor signals, enabling reliable odor identity across concentrations while rapidly separating (decorrelating) similar smell patterns for better discrimination.
flypapers
Dr Keith Wilson is on Eurosky✦
Charrvein
Albert Cardona
Fabrizio Musacchio
Anthropology.net