Presentation Details
| Accessory olfactory bulb mitral cell representations of naturalistic social odors across stimulus intensity, sex, and cellular compartments Kevin Y Gonzalez-Velandia, Tomás Avilés-Tamariz, Julian Meeks. Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY, USA |
Abstract
The mammalian accessory olfactory system (AOS) detects secreted, fluid-borne social chemosensory cues. These cues are sensed by sensory neurons in the vomeronasal organ (VNO), where they evoke activity that is transmitted directly to mitral cells (MCs), the principal output neurons of the accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). Within the AOB, MC responses are further shaped by local inhibitory circuits, generating neural representations that modulate important social centers downstream. Despite their central role, key aspects of MC function remain unclear, including how MCs encode stimulus intensity, whether sensory representations differ between sexes, how cellular anatomy shapes stimuli tuning, and whether there exists a spatial organization of the MCs responses within the AOB depending on the sensory input type. To address these gaps, we measured AOB MC calcium responses to a panel of naturalistic urine stimuli using an ex vivo AOS preparation that preserves functional connectivity between the VNO and AOB. Using virally mediated GCaMP6f expression and two-photon imaging, we recorded MC activity in adult male and female Pcdh21-Cre mice while stimulating the VNO across multiple stimulus concentrations. We combined small-field single-plane imaging with wide-field volumetric imaging to compare tuning properties across distinct MC compartments, including glomerular tufts, primary dendrites, and cell bodies. Together, this work advances our understanding of how AOB mitral cells encode socially relevant chemosensory information and organize their neural representations within the AOB, and establishes a foundation for future studies examining how experience-dependent plasticity in the AOS shapes neural activity patterns that support behavioral flexibility.
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