School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, United States of America.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, La Jolla, CA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2022 Jul 13;17(7):e0270358. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0270358. eCollection 2022.
Animals use odors in many natural contexts, for example, for finding mates or food, or signaling danger. Most analyses of natural odors search for either the most meaningful components of a natural odor mixture, or they use linear metrics to analyze the mixture compositions. However, we have recently shown that the physical space for complex mixtures is 'hyperbolic', meaning that there are certain combinations of variables that have a disproportionately large impact on perception and that these variables have specific interpretations in terms of metabolic processes taking place inside the flower and fruit that produce the odors. Here we show that the statistics of odorants and odorant mixtures produced by inflorescences (Brassica rapa) are also better described with a hyperbolic rather than a linear metric, and that combinations of odorants in the hyperbolic space are better predictors of the nectar and pollen resources sought by bee pollinators than the standard Euclidian combinations. We also show that honey bee and bumble bee antennae can detect most components of the B. rapa odor space that we tested, and the strength of responses correlates with positions of odorants in the hyperbolic space. In sum, a hyperbolic representation can be used to guide investigation of how information is represented at different levels of processing in the CNS.
动物在许多自然环境中使用气味，例如寻找配偶或食物，或发出危险信号。大多数对自然气味的分析要么寻找自然气味混合物中最有意义的成分，要么使用线性度量来分析混合物的组成。然而，我们最近表明，复杂混合物的物理空间是“双曲的”，这意味着存在某些变量组合对感知有不成比例的大影响，并且这些变量在产生气味的花朵和果实内部发生的代谢过程中具有特定的解释。在这里，我们表明由花序（芸薹属植物）产生的气味剂和气味剂混合物的统计数据也可以用双曲度量而不是线性度量更好地描述，并且双曲空间中的气味剂组合比标准的欧几里得组合更好地预测蜜蜂传粉者所寻找的花蜜和花粉资源。我们还表明，蜜蜂和熊蜂的触角可以检测到我们测试的芸薹属植物气味空间的大多数成分，并且响应的强度与气味剂在双曲空间中的位置相关。总之，可以使用双曲表示来指导研究信息在中枢神经系统的不同处理水平上是如何表示的。
