Department of Neurobiology, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA.
Nat Commun. 2018 Feb 26;9(1):839. doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03262-4.
All motile organisms use spatially distributed chemical features of their surroundings to guide their behaviors, but the neural mechanisms underlying such behaviors in mammals have been difficult to study, largely due to the technical challenges of controlling chemical concentrations in space and time during behavioral experiments. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a system to control and maintain an olfactory virtual landscape. This system uses rapid flow controllers and an online predictive algorithm to deliver precise odorant distributions to head-fixed mice as they explore a virtual environment. We establish an odor-guided virtual navigation behavior that engages hippocampal CA1 "place cells" that exhibit similar properties to those previously reported for real and visual virtual environments, demonstrating that navigation based on different sensory modalities recruits a similar cognitive map. This method opens new possibilities for studying the neural mechanisms of olfactory-driven behaviors, multisensory integration, innate valence, and low-dimensional sensory-spatial processing.
所有能动生物都利用周围环境中空间分布的化学特征来引导其行为，但由于在行为实验中控制化学浓度的时空具有技术挑战性，因此，哺乳动物中此类行为的神经机制一直难以研究。为了克服这些挑战，我们引入了一种控制和维持嗅觉虚拟景观的系统。该系统使用快速流量控制器和在线预测算法，在头部固定的小鼠探索虚拟环境时，向其输送精确的气味分布。我们建立了一种气味引导的虚拟导航行为，该行为涉及海马 CA1“位置细胞”，其表现出与先前报道的真实和视觉虚拟环境中相似的特性，表明基于不同感觉模式的导航会调用类似的认知图。该方法为研究嗅觉驱动行为、多感觉整合、先天效价和低维感觉空间处理的神经机制开辟了新的可能性。
