Design principles of the sparse coding network and the role of “sister cells” in the olfactory system of Drosophila

Sensory systems face the challenge to represent sensory inputs in a way to allow easy readout of sensory information by higher brain areas. In the olfactory system of the fly drosopohila melanogaster, projection neurons (PNs) of the antennal lobe (AL) convert a dense activation of glomeruli into a s...

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Published in:Frontiers in computational neuroscience Vol. 7; p. 141
Main Authors: Zhang, Danke, Li, Yuanqing, Wu, Si, Rasch, Malte J.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 23.10.2013
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects:
Antennal lobe
Codes
Discrimination
Drosophila Olfactory System
Firing pattern
Homotypical projection neurons
Insects
mushroom body
Neural coding
Neurons
Neuroscience
Noise
Noise robustness
Odor
Olfactory system
reservoir computing
Science
Sensory evaluation
Sensory systems
Smell
Sparse Coding
Beijing China
China
drosophila olfactory system
divergent projection
sparse coding
noise robustness
homotypical projection neurons
mushroom body
ISSN:1662-5188, 1662-5188
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Sensory systems face the challenge to represent sensory inputs in a way to allow easy readout of sensory information by higher brain areas. In the olfactory system of the fly drosopohila melanogaster, projection neurons (PNs) of the antennal lobe (AL) convert a dense activation of glomeruli into a sparse, high-dimensional firing pattern of Kenyon cells (KCs) in the mushroom body (MB). Here we investigate the design principles of the olfactory system of drosophila in regard to the capabilities to discriminate odor quality from the MB representation and its robustness to different types of noise. We focus on understanding the role of highly correlated homotypic projection neurons ("sister cells") found in the glomeruli of flies. These cells are coupled by gap-junctions and receive almost identical sensory inputs, but target randomly different KCs in MB. We show that sister cells might play a crucial role in increasing the robustness of the MB odor representation to noise. Computationally, sister cells thus might help the system to improve the generalization capabilities in face of noise without impairing the discriminability of odor quality at the same time.
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Reviewed by: Venkatesh N. Murthy, Harvard University, USA; James E. Fitzgerald, Harvard University, USA
Edited by: Rava A. Da Silveira, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France
This article was submitted to the journal Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.
ISSN:1662-5188
1662-5188
DOI:10.3389/fncom.2013.00141