Olfactory Object Recognition Based on Fine-Scale Stimulus Timing in Drosophila

Aarti Sehdev; Yunusa G Mohammed; Tilman Triphan; Paul Szyszka

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2019.02.014

Olfactory Object Recognition Based on Fine-Scale Stimulus Timing in Drosophila

iScience. 2019 Mar 29:13:113-124. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2019.02.014. Epub 2019 Feb 18.

Authors

Aarti Sehdev¹, Yunusa G Mohammed¹, Tilman Triphan², Paul Szyszka³

Affiliations

¹ University of Konstanz, Department of Biology, Neurobiology, Konstanz 78457, Germany.
² University of Leipzig, Institute of Biology, Department of Genetics, Leipzig 04103, Germany.
³ University of Konstanz, Department of Biology, Neurobiology, Konstanz 78457, Germany. Electronic address: paul@szyszkalab.com.

Abstract

Odorants of behaviorally relevant objects (e.g., food sources) intermingle with those from other sources. Therefore to determine whether an odor source is good or bad-without actually visiting it-animals first need to segregate the odorants from different sources. To do so, animals could use temporal stimulus cues, because odorants from one source exhibit correlated fluctuations, whereas odorants from different sources are less correlated. However, the behaviorally relevant timescales of temporal stimulus cues for odor source segregation remain unclear. Using behavioral experiments with free-flying flies, we show that (1) odorant onset asynchrony increases flies' attraction to a mixture of two odorants with opposing innate or learned valence and (2) attraction does not increase when the attractive odorant arrives first. These data suggest that flies can use stimulus onset asynchrony for odor source segregation and imply temporally precise neural mechanisms for encoding odors and for segregating them into distinct objects.

Keywords: Behavioral Neuroscience; Biological Sciences; Entomology.