Cracking the Olfactory Code

项目总结(总体：破解嗅觉密码) 感觉驱动感知，感知为决策和行动提供信息。嗅觉是人类使用的主要感官 大多数动物与环境互动。然而，嗅觉仍然笼罩在神秘之中--我们没有 了解哪些分子气味特征对嗅觉系统很重要，哪些对嗅觉系统不重要，这些信息如何 这些特征被重新组合在一起，在大脑中创建整体气味表示，或者如何 表征与知觉有关。因此，我们对核心缺乏经验上的理解 在嗅觉处理的每个阶段都会发生变化，这最终会导致感知和 行为。此外，我们缺乏一个明确的理论框架来理解刺激空间是如何既 离散和高维产生了一个连续和低维的感知空间。因为 嗅觉系统是“浅的”--意思是在两个突触中，有关完整气味物体的信息是 抽象和概括-理解这一特定的电路也将提供对 与建筑相关的大脑分配皮质区域对行为至关重要(例如，小脑、海马体)，并进入 在整合不同信息源方面发挥关键作用的皮质中心(例如，前额叶皮质、后部 顶叶皮质)。在这里，我们建议通过收集系统范围内的第一个 对一大组原则性气味的神经和知觉反应的数据集，并通过应用统一的 对其解释的统计和理论方法。该项目将召集具有专业知识的研究小组 它横跨神经生物学，并将利用分子遗传学、神经成像、 电生理学、光遗传学和化学遗传学、人类心理物理学和机器学习 嗅觉系统的水平(从外周感受器到皮质再到感知和行为输出)。已被占用 总之，这些实验将建立一个参考数据集，揭示由执行的关键转换 嗅觉系统，测试一个关键的嗅觉统一理论，并创建一个社区范围的资源，将 推动新的理论和实验。这项工作也将对我们的将军产生广泛的影响 理解感觉信息在大脑中是如何组织的，以促进适应性行动。

Project Summary (Overall: Cracking the Olfactory Code) Sensation drives perception, which informs decisions and actions. Olfaction is the main sense used by most animals to interact with the environment. However, olfaction remains shrouded in mystery — we do not know which molecular odorant features matter to the olfactory system and which do not, how information about these features is recombined to create holistic odor representations within the brain, or how those representations relate to perception. As a consequence, we lack an empirical understanding of the core transformations taking place at each stage of olfactory processing, which ultimately lead to perception and behavior. In addition, we lack a clear theoretical framework for understanding how a stimulus space that is both discrete and high-dimensional yields a perceptual space that is continuous and low dimensional. Because the olfactory system is “shallow” — meaning that within two synapses information about complete odor objects is abstracted and generalized — understanding this specific circuit will also afford general insight both into architecturally-related allocortical brain regions critical to behavior (e.g., cerebellum, hippocampus), and into cortical centers that play a key role in integrating diverse sources of information (e.g., prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex). Here we propose to reveal the computational logic of olfaction by collecting the first system-wide dataset of neural and perceptual responses to a large, principled set of odorants, and by applying a unified statistical and theoretical approach to its interpretation. This project will convene research groups with expertise that spans neurobiology, and will leverage recent technical advances in molecular genetics, neural imaging, electrophysiology, opto- and chemogenetics, human psychophysics, and machine learning to interrogate all levels (from peripheral receptors to cortex to perceptual and behavioral output) of the olfactory system. Taken together, these experiments will establish a reference dataset that reveals the key transformations performed by the olfactory system, test a key unifying theory for olfaction, and create a community-wide resource that will prompt new theory and experiment. This work will also have wide-ranging implications for our general understanding of how sensory information is organized in the brain to facilitate adaptive action.