The subject of my lecture is the sense of smell, one of the five senses through which we perceive the world. Through the sense of smell, humans and other mammals can perceive a vast number and variety of chemicals in the external world. It is estimated that humans can sense as many as 10,000 to 100,000 chemicals as having a distinct odor. All of these “odorants” are small, volatile molecules. H...

In odor-cued taste avoidance (OCTA), thirsty mice, offered either an odorized nonaversive fluid (S+) or an odorized aversive fluid (S-), quickly learn to use odor to avoid drinking the S-. Acquisition of both odor detection and odor discrimination tasks is very rapid with learning evidenced in most cases by either long response times or total avoidance on the second presentation of the S- stimu...

Nitric oxide (NO) is thought to play an important neuromodulatory role in olfaction. We are using the hawkmoth Manduca sexta to investigate the function of NO signaling in the antennal lobe (AL; the primary olfactory network in invertebrates). We have found previously that NO is present at baseline levels, dramatically increases in response to odor stimulation, and alters the electrophysiology ...

Nonassociative odor learning paradigms are often used to assess memory, social recognition and neuromodulation of olfactory pathways. We here use a modified object recognition paradigm to investigate how an important task parameter, delay between encoding and recall trials, affects the properties of this memory. We show that both memory for a previously investigated odorant and discrimination o...

The human sense of smell is often analyzed as being composed of three main components comprising olfactory threshold, odor discrimination and the ability to identify odors. A relevant distinction of the three components and their differential changes in distinct disorders remains a research focus. The present data-driven analysis aimed at establishing a cluster structure in the pattern of olfac...