Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittency

In order to survive, animals often need to navigate a complex odor landscape where odors can exist in airborne plumes. Several odor plume properties change with distance from the odor source, providing potential navigational cues to searching animals. Here, we focus on odor intermittency, a temporal odor plume property that measures the fraction of time odor is present at a given point within the plume and decreases with increasing distance from the odor source. We sought to determine if mice are capable of using changes in intermittency to locate an odor source. To do so, we trained mice on an intermittency discrimination task. We establish that mice can discriminate odor plume samples of low and high intermittency and that the neural responses in the olfactory bulb can account for task performance and support intermittency encoding. Modulation of sniffing, a behavioral parameter that is highly dynamic during odor-guided navigation, affects both behavioral outcomes on the intermittency..., Mice were tested to see if they could discriminate different levels of odor intermittency (an odor plume property). Labview was used to run the tests. The RedShirtImaging Neuroplex and NeuroCCD system was used for concomitant optical imaging of the dorsal olfactory bulb in the head-fixed mice. Half the mice expressed G-CamP6f in olfactory receptor neurons, the other half in post-synaptic mitral/tufted cells. Matlab was used to analyze the behavioral and neural glomerular data. Another set of mice was similarly optically imaged under anesthesia to systematically assess neural coding across the dorsal olfactory bulbs of odor intermittency as a function of sniff rate., , # Behavioral discrimination and olfactory bulb encoding of odor plume intermittency

## Artificial\_Sniffing.zip - odor input files

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### ZIPPED ARCHIVES:

1. Artificial_Sniffing/
These are imaging experiments done solely in anesthetized mice.
Artificial_Sniffing/odor_input_files/
These are the dynamic odor trace files, and sequences thereof, during the artificial sniffing experiments.
Artificial_Sniffing/snifftraces_input_files/
These are the dynamic sniffing trace files, during the artificial sniffing experiments.
Artificial_Sniffing/Data/
Recorded glomerular responses in MAT files.
Artificial_Sniffing/Analysis code/
ArtificialSniffingAnalysisElife.m: MATLAB code to analyze the artificial sniffing data
ArtificalSniffAverageResponses.mat and ArtificalSniffPulseResponses.mat: Tables with average responses and individual odor pulse responses
2. Behavior\
These are experiments done solely in awake mice.
Behavior\Stimuli\
These are ...