Neuroethology utilizes a wide range of multidisciplinary approaches to decipher neural correlates of natural behaviors associated with an animal's ecological niche. By placing emphasis on comparative analyses of adaptive and evolutionary trends across species, a neuroethological perspective is uniquely suited to uncovering general organizational and biological principles that shape the function...

Recent work established the spread of interglomerular excitation in the Drosophila antennal lobe. Two papers in this issue of Neuron, by Huang et al. and Yaksi and Wilson, show that cholinergic krasavietz local interneurons are a major substrate for this spread of excitation, predominantly via electrical coupling.

Although for many animals olfactive perceptions must be the most important source of information about the state of their environment, we know relatively little about this chemoreceptive sensory system. The fact that our own sense of smell is comparatively rudimentary has certainly contributed to the relative lack of attention that olfactory behaviour and physiology have received. Our smelling ...

Olfaction today has many applications not only for an individual’s life but also for the industries. Applications include food product quality control, safety and security, environmental monitoring, indoor air quality, health care, medical diagnosis, pharmaceutical purposes, and military applications. In these applications human olfaction is still the primary instrument. This is a costly proces...

Aim of the current work was to examine developmental changes in adolescents' olfactory performance and personal significance of olfaction. In the first study olfactory identification abilities of 76 participants (31 males and 45 females aged between 10 and 18 years; M = 13.8, SD = 2.3) was evaluated with the Sniffin Stick identification test, presented in a cued and in an uncued manner. Verbal ...

Smell 'sensations' are among the most mysterious of conscious experiences, and have been cited in defense of the thesis that the character of perceptual experience is independent of the physical events that seem to give rise to it. Here we review the scientific literature on olfaction, and we argue that olfaction has a distinctive profile in relation to the other modalities, on four counts: in ...

Introduction Loss of smell is involved in various neurologic and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson disease and Alzheimer disease. However, the olfactory test is usually neglected by physicians at large. Objective The aim of this study was to review the current literature about the relationship between olfactory dysfunction and neurologic and neurodegenerative diseases. Data Synthesi...

Citation: Clavijo McCormick A, Grosse-Wilde E, Wheeler D, Mescher MC, Hansson BS and De Moraes CM (2017) Comparing the Expression of Olfaction-Related Genes in Gypsy Moth (Lymantria dispar) Adult Females and Larvae from One Flightless and Two Flight-Capable Populations. Front. Ecol. Evol. 5:115. doi: 10.3389/fevo.2017.00115 Comparing the Expression of Olfaction-Related Genes in Gypsy Moth (Lyma...

The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is equipped with a sophisticated olfactory sensory system that permits it to recognize and discriminate hundreds of discrete odorants. The perception of these odorants is essential for the animal to identify relevant food sources and suitable sites for egg-laying. Advances in the last year have begun to define the molecular basis of this insect's discrimi...

OBJECTIVE To characterize the olfactory identification in 40 essential tremor (ET) patients, with the University of Pennsylvania 12 Smell Identification Test (UPSIT), to correlate UPSIT scores to clinical and epidemiological data and to compare it to 89 aged matched controls. METHOD Patients were assessed using ET Clinical Scale of Evaluation and UPSIT. RESULTS In patients with ET, the UPSI...