Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Center for Neural Computation, The Faculty of Medicine, NTNU, Olav Kyrres Gate 9, 7030 Trondheim, Norway.
Mechanical Engineering Department, Koc University, Rumelifeneri Yolu, 34450 Istanbul, Turkey.
Curr Biol. 2017 Jan 23;27(2):166-174. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.11.036. Epub 2016 Dec 29.
Motile cilia are actively beating hair-like structures that cover the surface of multiple epithelia. The flow that ciliary beating generates is utilized for diverse functions and depends on the spatial location and biophysical properties of cilia. Here we show that the motile cilia in the nose of aquatic vertebrates are spatially organized and stably beat with an asymmetric pattern, resulting in a robust and stereotypical flow around the nose. Our results demonstrate that these flow fields attract odors to the nose pit and facilitate detection of odors by the olfactory system in stagnant environments. Moreover, we show that ciliary beating quickly exchanges the content of the nose, thereby improving the temporal resolution of the olfactory system for detecting dynamic changes of odor plumes in turbulent environments. Altogether, our work unravels a central function of ciliary beating for generating flow fields that increase the sensitivity and the temporal resolution of olfactory computations in the vertebrate brain.
游动纤毛是一种活跃的毛发状结构，覆盖在多种上皮细胞的表面。纤毛的拍打产生的流动用于多种功能，并且取决于纤毛的空间位置和生物物理特性。在这里，我们表明水生脊椎动物鼻子中的游动纤毛是空间组织的，并以不对称的模式稳定地拍打，从而在鼻子周围产生强大而典型的流动。我们的结果表明，这些流场将气味吸引到鼻窝中，并有助于嗅觉系统在静止环境中检测气味。此外，我们表明纤毛的拍打会迅速交换鼻子的内容物，从而提高嗅觉系统在湍流环境中检测气味羽流动态变化的时间分辨率。总的来说，我们的工作揭示了纤毛拍打产生流场的核心功能，这增加了脊椎动物大脑中嗅觉计算的灵敏度和时间分辨率。
