Tariq Mohammad F, Sterrett Scott C, Moore Sidney, Lane Lane, Perkel David J, Gire David H
Graduate Program in Neuroscience, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA.
bioRxiv. 2024 Jul 5:2023.11.10.566539. doi: 10.1101/2023.11.10.566539.
Animals navigating turbulent odor plumes exhibit a rich variety of behaviors, and employ efficient strategies to locate odor sources. A growing body of literature has started to probe this complex task of localizing airborne odor sources in walking mammals to further our understanding of neural encoding and decoding of naturalistic sensory stimuli. However, correlating the intermittent olfactory information with behavior has remained a long-standing challenge due to the stochastic nature of the odor stimulus. We recently reported a method to record real-time olfactory information available to freely moving mice during odor-guided navigation, hence overcoming that challenge. Here we combine our odor-recording method with head-motion tracking to establish correlations between plume encounters and head movements. We show that mice exhibit robust head-pitch motions in the 5-14Hz range during an odor-guided navigation task, and that these head motions are modulated by plume encounters. Furthermore, mice reduce their angles with respect to the source upon plume contact. Head motions may thus be an important part of the sensorimotor behavioral repertoire during naturalistic odor-source localization.
在湍急的气味羽流中导航的动物会表现出各种各样丰富的行为，并采用有效的策略来定位气味源。越来越多的文献开始探究在行走的哺乳动物中定位空气中气味源这一复杂任务，以加深我们对自然主义感官刺激的神经编码和解码的理解。然而，由于气味刺激的随机性，将间歇性嗅觉信息与行为相关联一直是一项长期挑战。我们最近报道了一种方法，可记录自由移动的小鼠在气味引导导航过程中可获得的实时嗅觉信息，从而克服了这一挑战。在此，我们将气味记录方法与头部运动跟踪相结合，以建立气味羽流遭遇与头部运动之间的关联。我们发现，在气味引导的导航任务中，小鼠在5 - 14赫兹范围内表现出强烈的头部俯仰运动，并且这些头部运动受到气味羽流遭遇的调节。此外，小鼠在接触气味羽流后会减小相对于气味源的角度。因此，头部运动可能是自然主义气味源定位过程中感觉运动行为库的一个重要组成部分。
