Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA.
J Neurosci. 2013 Aug 21;33(34):13903-13. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0037-13.2013.
Animals modulate their courtship and territorial behaviors in response to olfactory cues produced by other animals. In rodents, detecting these cues is the primary role of the accessory olfactory system (AOS). We sought to systematically investigate the natural stimulus coding logic and robustness in neurons of the first two stages of accessory olfactory processing, the vomeronasal organ (VNO) and accessory olfactory bulb (AOB). We show that firing rate responses of just a few well-chosen mouse VNO or AOB neurons can be used to reliably encode both sex and strain of other mice from cues contained in urine. Additionally, we show that this population code can generalize to new concentrations of stimuli and appears to represent stimulus identity in terms of diverging paths in coding space. Together, the results indicate that firing rate code on the temporal order of seconds is sufficient for accurate classification of pheromonal patterns at different concentrations and may be used by AOS neural circuitry to discriminate among naturally occurring urine stimuli.
动物会根据其他动物产生的嗅觉线索来调节求偶和领地行为。在啮齿动物中，检测这些线索是附属嗅觉系统（AOS）的主要作用。我们试图系统地研究附属嗅觉处理的前两个阶段，即犁鼻器（VNO）和副嗅球（AOB）中神经元的自然刺激编码逻辑和鲁棒性。我们表明，仅少数精选的小鼠犁鼻器或副嗅球神经元的放电率反应可用于从尿液中的线索中可靠地编码其他小鼠的性别和品系。此外，我们还表明，这种群体编码可以推广到新的刺激浓度，并且似乎以编码空间中发散路径的形式代表刺激身份。总之，这些结果表明，在秒的时间顺序上的放电率编码足以准确分类不同浓度的信息素模式，并且可能被 AOS 神经回路用于区分自然发生的尿液刺激。
