Kauer J S, White J
Department of Neuroscience, Tufts University School of Medicine, 136 Harrison Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts 02111, USA.
Annu Rev Neurosci. 2001;24:963-79. doi: 10.1146/annurev.neuro.24.1.963.
Functional imaging methods permit analysis of neuronal systems in which activity is broadly distributed in time and space. In the olfactory system the dimensions that describe odorant stimuli in "odorant space" are still poorly defined. One way of trying to characterize the attributes of this space is to examine the ways in which its dimensions are encoded by the neurons and circuits making up the system and to compare these responses with physical-chemical attributes of the stimuli and with the output behavior of the animal. For documenting distributed events as they occur, imaging methods are among the few tools available. We are still in the early stages of this analysis; however, a number of recent studies have contributed new information to our understanding of the odorant coding problem. This paper describes imaging results in the context of other data that have contributed to our understanding of how odors are encoded by the peripheral olfactory pathway.
功能成像方法允许对神经元系统进行分析，在这些系统中，活动在时间和空间上广泛分布。在嗅觉系统中，在“气味空间”中描述气味刺激的维度仍然定义不明确。试图表征这个空间属性的一种方法是检查构成该系统的神经元和神经回路对其维度进行编码的方式，并将这些反应与刺激的物理化学属性以及动物的输出行为进行比较。为了记录分布式事件的发生情况，成像方法是少数可用的工具之一。我们仍处于这一分析的早期阶段；然而，最近的一些研究为我们理解气味编码问题提供了新的信息。本文结合其他有助于我们理解外周嗅觉通路如何编码气味的数据，描述了成像结果。
