BACKGROUND Changes in olfactory functions have been found in many neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The aim of the present study was to evaluate the relationship between olfactory functions (odor-detection thresholds, odor identification, and odor preference) and autism severity and sensory-related behavior in children and adolescents with ...

The fly olfactory system has a three-layer architecture: The fly's olfactory receptor neurons send odor information to the first layer (the encoder) where this information is formatted as combinatorial odor code, one which is maximally informative, with the most informative neurons firing fastest. This first layer then sends the encoded odor information to the second layer (decoder), which cons...

Odor identification is one of the main tasks of the olfactory system. It is performed almost independently from the concentration of the odor providing a robust recognition. This capacity to ignore concentration information does not preclude the olfactory system from estimating concentration itself. Significant experimental evidence has indicated that the olfactory system is able to infer simul...

We present a model of a coupled system of the olfactory bulb and cortex. Odor inputs to the epithelium are transformed to oscillatory bulbar activities. The cortex recognizes the odor by resonating to the bulbar oscillating pattern when the amplitude and phase patterns from the bulb match an odor memory stored in the intracortical synapses. We assume a cortical structure which transforms the od...

Association of odor and reward during the early postnatal period modifies rat pup behavioral responses and olfactory bulb neural responses to subsequent presentations of that odor. Recent evidence has shown that olfactory bulb output neurons, mitral/tufted cells, receive convergent odor and reward inputs. The present report demonstrates that contiguous odor-reward pairings prevent mitral/tufted...

Title of Document: STATISTICAL ODOR PREDICTION MODELS FOR SUPPORTING BIOSOLIDS ODOR MANAGEMENT Sirapong Vilalai, Doctor of Philosophy, 2008 Directed By: Associate Professor Steven A Gabriel Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Biosolids are being beneficially recycled for agricultural purpose. Often, however, biosolids odors diminish marketability of biosolids, bring community oppo...

Amino acid homopolymers were used to determine production of radiolytic volatiles by irradiation. Many new volatiles were generated, and the amounts of volatiles in amino acid homopolymers changed after irradiation. Each amino acid homopolymer group produced different odor characteristics, but the intensities of odor from all amino acid groups were weak, except for sulfur-containing amino acids...

The effect of task duration on odor discrimination in aging was studied. Twenty-seven young male adults and 24 young female adults between 18 and 30 years of age, and 17 older male adults between 45 and 65 years of age completed an odor discrimination task. The odor discrimination task consisted of two parts of 16 trials each in which, from three bottles consisting of two identical and one aber...

In insects, the search for food is highly dependent on olfactory sensory input. Here, we investigated whether a single key odorant within an odor blend or the complexity of the odor blend influences the attraction of Drosophila melanogaster to a food source. A key odorant is defined as an odorant that elicits a difference in the behavioral response when two similar complex odor blends are offer...

This study assessed the responsiveness of newborn breast- and bottle-fed infants to presentations of maternal odor. Maternal odor was presented for 1 min to crying, sleeping or awake newborns. The odors were: (1) own mother's odor - presentation of a hospital gown worn by the baby's mother, (2) other mother's odor - presentation of a hospital gown of another newborn baby's mother, (3) clean gow...