Marin, Alina Cristina;
(2023)
The role of odour dynamics in spatial perception in mice.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Natural odour plumes are shaped by airflow turbulence, resulting in high frequency odour intensity fluctuations that may contain information about odour source location. In the present work I aimed to characterise how information about odour source location is acquired through olfaction in the mouse, with a specific focus on the source separation and distance discrimination tasks. I first developed methods to generate, record and reproduce naturalistic odour plumes in a laboratory environment. I then paired either naturalistic odour plume delivery, or an “olfactory virtual reality” approach, to a high-throughput behavioural conditioning system, where I trained mice to perform spatial-related discrimination tasks. Using these techniques, I showed that mice can perform “virtual source separation” using odour plumes. Furthermore, the correlation of concentration fluctuations of the different chemical components of the olfactory stimulus plays a key role in performing this discrimination. In another set of experiments, I showed that mice can discriminate between two sources with the same chemical composition, but physically placed at different distances from the mouse. Following plume analysis and in keeping with existing literature, I suggest that temporal features of the odour plume at a frequency higher than the respiratory cycle of the mouse could be more informative for this discrimination than measures using slower timescales, such as average concentration over a trial. In subsequent calcium imaging experiments, I identified projection neurons in the olfactory bulb that responded differentially to near compared to far odour sources in olfactory virtual reality. Moreover, the responses of these “distance-sensitive” cells were correlated to the aforementioned sub-sniff temporal features. Thus, olfaction is a high bandwidth sense with temporal structure containing information about olfactory space that is indeed accessible to mice.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The role of odour dynamics in spatial perception in mice |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2022. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10165576 |
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