Ling Doris, Zhang Lijun, Saha Debajit, Chen Alex Bo-Yuan, Raman Baranidharan
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, United States.
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St Louis, United States.
Elife. 2025 Aug 26;12:RP89330. doi: 10.7554/eLife.89330.
Neural responses evoked by a stimulus reduce upon repetition. While this adaptation allows the sensory system to attend to novel cues, does information about the recurring stimulus, particularly its intensity, get compromised? We explored this issue in the locust olfactory system. We found that locusts' innate behavioral response to odorants varied with repetition and stimulus intensity. Counterintuitively, the stimulus-intensity dependent differences became significant only after adaptation had set in. Adaptation altered responses of individual neurons in the antennal lobe (neural network downstream to insect antenna). These response variations to repetitions of the same stimulus were unpredictable and inconsistent across intensities. Although both adaptation and intensity decrements resulted in an overall reduction in spiking activities across neurons, these changes could be disentangled, and information about stimulus intensity was robustly maintained by ensemble neural responses. In sum, these results show how information about odor intensity can be preserved in an adaptation-invariant manner.
由刺激引发的神经反应在重复时会减弱。虽然这种适应性使感觉系统能够关注新的线索，但关于重复刺激的信息，尤其是其强度，是否会受到损害呢？我们在蝗虫嗅觉系统中探讨了这个问题。我们发现蝗虫对气味剂的先天行为反应随重复和刺激强度而变化。与直觉相反，刺激强度依赖性差异仅在适应性出现后才变得显著。适应性改变了触角叶（昆虫触角下游的神经网络）中单个神经元的反应。这些对相同刺激重复的反应变化在不同强度下是不可预测且不一致的。尽管适应性和强度递减都会导致神经元整体放电活动的减少，但这些变化可以被区分开，并且刺激强度信息通过神经元群体反应得到了有力的维持。总之，这些结果展示了气味强度信息如何以适应性不变的方式得以保留。
