Biophysical Aspects of Olfaction
Final Report Abstract
Statistical description of optimal receptor arrays: In summary, our paper here is the first to pose the question of the optimal design of a receptor array and answers it for a very simple system. Clearly, realistic olfactory systems are much more complicated and these additional complications need to be considered further. Statistical description of normalized odor representations: In summary, we showed that the normalization operation present in the olfactory system has interesting consequences on the coding behavior. On the one hand, it allows to obtain concentration-invariant representations, whose sparsity can be controlled by a single parameter. On the other hand, the additional non-linear processing makes the system sensitiv to variations in the mixture size and the sensitivity distribution of the receptors, which could both limit the usefulness of the receptor array. It will thus be interesting to see whether evolution found ways to circumvent these disadvantages.
Publications
- Normalized neural representations of complex odors. PLoS One, 11(11):e0166456, 2016
David Zwicker
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166456) - Receptor arrays optimized for natural odor statistics. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 113(20):5570–75, 2016
David Zwicker, Arvind Murugan, and Michael P Brenner
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1600357113)
