Investigating the roles of odor -evoked oscillations in information processing in the turtle olfactory bulb.

Abstract

It has been earlier established that presentation of an odorant stimulus to the turtle evokes specific spatio-temporal responses in the olfactory bulb. This response includes three distinct oscillatory patterns (rostral, middle and caudal) that have different spatial (locations and scopes) and temporal (frequencies and delay from the odorant onset) properties. In this thesis we investigate, using modeling and experimental approaches; the mechanisms of formation and the role of the oscillatory patterning in the turtle olfactory bulb. We have built a computational model that incorporates the basic anatomy and neurophysiology of the olfactory bulb to investigate how the observed patterns relate to activity of individual neurons and what roles they could play in olfactory information processing. We show that three basic anatomical/physiological properties of the olfactory network underlie formation of a temporal sequence of simultaneous activations of glomerular modules: fast synaptic inhibition between populations of excitatory and inhibitory cells, slow self-inhibition observed on excitatory cells; and input strength. The model suggests that the role of oscillations is to organize the neural activity in a temporal sequence which groups the activation of glomerular modules based on the input strength similarity. We show that this type of code explains particularly well the experimental findings reported also by other groups, showing that temporal patterning may mediate discrimination of similar odorants. Furthermore, we showed that within our model, feedback from cortical regions of the brain could modulate oscillatory patterning and provide mechanisms to generate experimentally observed period doubling in one of the oscillations. This requires the cortical processing to act as a type of coincidence modulator and provide functional coupling between excitatory modules that is absent in the bulbar network. This hypothesis is partially supported by our experiments that investigate dynamics of cortical feedback on the olfactory bulb. Using optical imaging with voltage sensitive dyes we showed that cortical feedback induced by stimulating one bulb changes odor evoked oscillatory patterning in the other bulb. We have observed that the feedback front cortical regions reduces overall response in the other olfactory bulb indicating that the cortical feedback has an inhibitory effect on the bulbs. Furthermore the changes in the oscillatory power indicate amplification of fast and slow caudal oscillation and reduction of the rostral oscillation, as was predicted from the model.