Parosmia is a common olfactory disorder. In this condition, odors are perceived in a different quality than usual. This distorted olfactory percept is typically reported to be unpleasant. Little is known about the pathophysiology of this phenomenon. Previous studies demonstrated smaller volumes of the olfactory bulbs in patients with parosmia compared to subjects without parosmia. In order to i...

Olfactory dysfunction constitutes one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and has been shown in individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). Whether the severity of olfactory impairments in aMCI patients parallels those in AD has not been clearly established. In addition, given reports of asymmetries in neuropathological burden in early AD, functional asymmetries in...

Imidacloprid is a chloronicotinyl insecticide which interacts with insect nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Thirty minutes after oral treatment of honeybees with imidacloprid, the olfactory learning performances in a proboscis extension reflex (PER) procedure were impaired. In parallel, an increase of the cytochrome oxidase labelling was found into the calyces of the mushroom bodies. Imidaclop...

x Table of Contents xii List of Figures xv List of Abbreviations xvii Copyright Page xix Preface to Chapter I 1 ...and in flies, you say? 1 Chapter I: An Introduction to Learning and Memory in the Fly 4 Olfactory Learning and Memory in Drosophila 5 Appetitive Olfactory Conditioning 7 Preface to Ch...

BACKGROUND The neural substrates of olfactory working memory are unknown. We addressed the questions of whether olfactory working memory involves a verbal representation of the odor, or a sensory image of the odor, or both, and the location of the neural substrates of these processes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure activity in the brain...

DNA methyltransferases (Dnmts) epigenetic writers catalyzing the transfer of methyl-groups to cytosine regulate stimulus-specific olfactory long-term memory (LTM) formation and extinction in honeybees. The physiological relevance of their function in neural networks, however, remains unknown. Here, we investigated how Dnmts impact neuroplasticity in the bees’ primary olfactory center, the anten...

While it is thought that short-term memory arises from changes in protein dynamics that increase the strength of synaptic signaling, many of the underlying fundamental molecular mechanisms remain unknown.Our lab developed a Caenorhabditis elegans assay of positive olfactory short-term associative memory (STAM), in which worms learn to associate food with an odor and can remember this associatio...

Although much work has investigated the contribution of brain regions such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex to the processing of fear learning and memory, fewer studies have examined the role of sensory systems, in particular the olfactory system, in the detection and perception of cues involved in learning and memory. The primary sensory receptive field maps of the olfactory...