#olfaction — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #olfaction, aggregated by home.social.
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📰 "Deep Representation Learning on Whole-Brain Population Dynamics Uncovers Geometrically Separable Neural Codes"
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.12.724368v1?rss=1
#DrosophilaMelanogaster
#Neuroscience
#Olfaction
#Drosophila #Metabolism #Sensory -
Scientists develop first-ever ‘smell map’ of receptors in noses | Health
(Photo by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels) By Talker By Stephen Beech The f…
#NewsBeep #News #Science #biology #Brain #branchesofneuroscience #CA #Canada #cognitiveneuroscience #CognitiveScience #limbicsystem #mentalprocesses #nervoussystem #Neuropsychology #Neuroscience #odor #olfaction #olfactoryreceptor #olfactorysystem #rhinology #sense #senseofsmell #senses #sensoryneuron #stephenbeech
https://www.newsbeep.com/ca/636355/ -
Hunter-gatherers in Malaysia have better-preserved smell genes than farmers — and new genomics research explains why. How you live shapes what your nose can detect, all the way down to your DNA.
#HumanEvolution #Genomics #Olfaction https://www.anthropology.net/p/what-hunter-gatherers-kept-that-farmers -
Now diving into the processing and transformation of raw olfactory stimulation of sensory neurons to the output of the olfactory neuropils via projection neurons, see these two papers, one in fly and one in zebrafish. The former shows how PNs respond to the derivative of the input, which is essential for tracking stimuli up a gradient, and the latter shows how the LNs perform a whitening of the olfactory input (to decorrelate the inputs into the otherwise multiply stimulated olfactory receptors and their corresponding sensory neurons) which optimally prepares similar stimuli for separation:
Kim AJ, Lazar AA, Slutskiy YB. Projection neurons in Drosophila antennal lobes signal the acceleration of odor concentrations. Elife. 2015 May 14;4:e06651.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/6651Wanner AA, Friedrich RW. Whitening of odor representations by the wiring diagram of the olfactory bulb. Nature neuroscience. 2020 Mar;23(3):433-42.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-019-0576-z4/4
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And in flies in particular, all papers signed by Rachel Wilson as the senior author (now a professor at Harvard Medical School) in the early 2000s are absolutely outstanding, on probing with electrophysiology and genetics the various synapses in the fruit fly olfactory system, e.g., the sensory neuron (ORN or OSN, synonyms) to the projection neurons (PNs), or the local neurons (LNs), or the LNs to each other or to the PNs, and the PNs back to the LNs. She's written a couple of reviews on the subject that are very accessible for the curious student.
Click on "Publications" and expand them, to find the ones published in Current Opinion in Neurobiology or in the Annual Review Neuroscience:
https://neuro.hms.harvard.edu/faculty-staff/rachel-wilson... like e.g., this one:
Wilson RI. Early olfactory processing in Drosophila: mechanisms and principles. Annual review of neuroscience. 2013 Jul 8;36(1):217-41.
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-neuro-062111-150533Rachel's more recent work is on neural networks in the fly for spatial navigation.
3/4
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On that, the work from Lucia Prieto-Godino in (then) Richard Benton's lab on "undead" neurons is critical, demonstrating that, beyond the genes encoding olfactory receptors, there is a much larger pool of pseudogenes (genes that aren't normally expressed) that, when rescued, result in additional, distinct yet functional glomeruli in the first-order neuropil for olfaction (the antennal lobe in an insect; the olfactory bulb in a vertebrate).
Prieto-Godino LL, Silbering AF, Khallaf MA, Cruchet S, Bojkowska K, Pradervand S, Hansson BS, Knaden M, Benton R. Functional integration of “undead” neurons in the olfactory system. Science advances. 2020 Mar 11;6(11):eaaz7238.
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/sciadv.aaz7238Lucia is now a lab head at The Crick, studying with comparative connectomics the evolution of olfactory circuits and more, in fruit flies.
2/4
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An undergraduate student asked me about olfactory sensory processing and this is what I replied. What have I missed of major importance, from the perspective of a senior undergrad?
The olfactory system is indeed fascinating, one that challenged researchers for some time. The first major break through came from Richard Axel's lab by the hand of the then student Leslie Vosshall, now professor at Rockefeller in New York and prominent HHMI Vicepresident and mosquito researcher.
Vosshall LB, Amrein H, Morozov PS, Rzhetsky A, Axel R. A spatial map of olfactory receptor expression in the Drosophila antenna. Cell. 1999 Mar 5;96(5):725-36.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(00)80582-6A search for "Vosshall Axel" in Google Scholar will surface related papers:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=vosshall+axel&btnG=A conceptual breakthrough in olfactory coding came from the study of receptors by several groups, in both flies and mice, and later in zebrafish, but what I find compelling is the development of the primacy hypothesis for olfactory receptors by Rinberg's and Koulakov's labs:
Wilson CD, Serrano GO, Koulakov AA, Rinberg D. A primacy code for odor identity. Nature communications. 2017 Nov 14;8(1):1477.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01432-4The above relates to the ability of animals to have a small number of olfactory receptors (like a fly larva) or more (an adult fruit fly) or many more (like moths and bees), or even more (like in a dog's nose), and yet the system works. More receptors support a less coarse encoding of odours, and vice versa. But the system for olfactory sensing is flexible and therefore evolvable.
1/4
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CW: spoilers: The Trip To Echo Spring
Up to page 5.
Well written, fulfilling to read. Which has more than made up for the distress of reading about the destruction wrought by alcoholism on the characters introduced.
Let's have a poll about sensory perception and how we experience smells, aromas & scents.
" ... and the smell of wood smoke is articulate in the air." O. Liang
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Smellosophy by A. S. Barwich. 2020
What the Nose Tells the Mind
A pioneering exploration of olfaction that upsets settled notions of how the brain translates sensory information.
Decades of cognition research have shown that external stimuli “spark” neural patterns in particular regions of the brain. -
Also the #iBehave seminar series continues. First speaker will be Prof. Dr. Veronica Egger (University of Regensburg), talking about "Rhythms in the #OlfactoryBulb: From #NeuronalNetwork #oscillations to heartbeat interoception"
📅 Jan 12, 2026, 10:30 am
👤 Host: Gaia Tavosanis
💻 Zoom link via [email protected] -
SemIDEEV de Maxime POLICARPO
📅 Lundi 3 novembre 2025 à 14h à l'IDEEV
⏩"Evolution of olfaction in vertebrates"
⏩ En savoir plus : https://www.ideev.universite-paris-saclay.fr/seminaires/
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🧠 New study by Asumbisa, Peyrache & Trenholm (2025): Stereo #olfaction underlies stable #coding of #HeadDirection in blind mice. Inhibiting #odor detection in just one nostril, or removing the spatial difference in airflow, disrupts head direction cell tuning and impairs mice’s spatial orientation → stereo smell is essential for using olfactory cues to form a stable, #allocentric sense of direction.
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Role of axo-axonic synapses among olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) in odor decorrelation, mediated by metabotropic acetylcholine receptors:
"Nonlinear high-activity neuronal excitation enhances odor discrimination", Julia E. Manoim-Wolkovitz et al. 2025
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)00198-8#neuroscience #Drosophila #AxoAxonicSynapses #synapses #olfaction
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In any case, once a red pepper smells like that, the flavour becomes also like how I'd imagine eating an agar plate of E. coli to taste. Inedible. Gross. Means I am very wary of any pre-prepared salad with cut red pepper in. (3/3)
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#Odors contain complex spatiotemporal information; @anantu_s @OPedroncini @AndreasTSchafer @TobiasAckels discuss how recent mammalian olfactory research has enhanced our understanding of how animals use #olfaction to navigate the environment #PLOSBiology https://plos.io/3AZEQ0z
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Monitoring Australia’s endangered species
while logging their habitatsScent dogs are being replaced by cost-effective biomonitoring of threatened species. Technology will detection chemical signals of wildlife assemblages in the environment. " Little did we know that traces of wildlife presence float in the air and can be detected through traces of DNA."
Will the air sampling techniques operate with the pollution of heavy logging machinery to detect the scent of a koala or a glider? Will it cut through the thick smoke from (bush) fires that follow? Will traffic pollution allow allow the technology to pick up the airborne eDNA?
>>
Frère, C., et.al (2023). Koalas, friends, and foes -- the application of airborne edna for the biomonitoring of threatened species.
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14784
#Koalas #glider #platypus #wildlife #conservation #BioMonitoring #dogs #ScentDogs #UAVs #eDNA #technosphere #olfaction #MoreData #NSWLogging #IndustrialLogging -
Detecting #odors on the edge: Researchers decipher how #insects #smell more with less.
#sensing #olfaction #Drosophila
https://phys.org/news/2024-05-odors-edge-decipher-insects.html
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Hi Everyone.
At the beginning of the year I received notice I've got my first funding as a new PI. It's for an ambitious project to look at how the main olfactory system in mice enables individualized social interactions. I wanted to hire a postdoc before, but now I really really want to hire a postdoc. If you know anyone who is at the right stage and might think the picture attached to this post looks cool, please can you share? There's a lot more to it than what's in the diagrams here.
The job ad is in several places including here:
https://www.sparksociety.org/resource-blog/2023/11/2/postdoc-bolding-lab#neurojobs #neuroscience #imaging #miniscope #olfaction #olfactory #photometry #electrophysiology #neuropixels
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Now out in Current Biology - our attempt at detecting protein homologs in the post-protein folding age.
Insect ORs and GRs are particularly difficult to work with because of rapid evolution and huge sequence divergence. By combining structure and sequence based searches, we surprisingly found homologs across the tree of life. Cryptic proteins as old as LUCA?
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.10.008
#phylogenetics #alphafold #evolution #ionchannels #olfaction #smell #gustation #taste #drosophila #asgard #LUCA
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We are getting closer to solving the great mystery of #olfaction research:
How to predict the #odour of a molecule based on its chemical structure?
Graphical neural networks (#GNNs) can predict the odour characterisation of a molecule by a group of human experts.
A principal odor map unifies diverse tasks in olfactory perception | Science https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.ade4401#F1
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How do #bees respond to #geosmin, the #smell of rain and wet soil?
Great collaboration with Florencia Scarano, Mukilan Deivarajan, Ettore Tiraboschi, Amélie Cabirol, Morgane Nouvian, and @drtnowotny,
using #stinging assays, #electroantennography, #calciumimaging, and #snn simulations"Geosmin suppresses defensive behaviour and elicits unusual neural responses in honey bees" just published in Scientific Reports
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Genetically encoded calcium indicators are becoming available in social insects.
After the first expression in honeybees (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.22.489138v2), now the first GCaMP-expressing ants have been created and used to study the coding of alarm pheromones in the antennal lobe.
#GECIs #GCaMP #twophoton #neuroscience #ants #olfaction #antennallobe #pheromones -
Se vienen muchas cositas... Hello fediverse! #introduction
I'm a Spanish researcher working on:
👃Sensores olfativos #olfaction #sensors
🗺️Exploración aleatoria #randomness
⚡Electrostática #electrostatics #electronics
🚥Módulos RGB #modular #lighting
🏚️Sismómetros #diy #seismometers
🤓y más #scienceTambién en https://youtube.com/Carl0sGS
Now for a few quiet months until I finish my #phd 🤫 ¡nos leemos! 😉
