Presenter(s): Isabelle Cullen—Biology
Faculty Mentor(s): Matt Smear, David McCormick
Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation
Olfaction is vital for many crucial animal behaviors such as social interaction, avoiding predators, and locating food . Our goal is to understand how an animal navigates toward the source of an odor . However, little is known about how odors are coded to inform olfactory search behavior . Air turbulence can cause odor distributions to be highly variable and unpredictable . Although we have previously characterized specific behavioral patterns in turbulent odor plumes, little is known about how odors are translated into movements . Our goal is to capture and understand the sensory input that informs these previously observed behaviors . We do this by injecting iGluSnFR, a fluorescent glutamate reporter, into the mitral cell layer of the olfactory bulb . This reporter tells us how glutamate released from olfactory sensory neuron terminals influences activity of mitral cells . iGluSnFR’s fast kinetics allows us to observe and measure glutamate levels as the mouse performs olfactory navigation . By revealing activity in olfactory sensory neurons during olfactory navigation, this technique can tell us how odor informs the mouse’s brain during active sampling . Following the development of this technique, we will image from iGluSnFR mice performing our olfactory search task to determine the neural computation that connects movement and sensation . Understanding how mice translate odor into behavior will inform our understanding of active sensory sampling behaviors in humans .