Calcium in Kenyon Cell Somata as a Substrate for an Olfactory Sensory Memory in Drosophila
Open Access
- 14 May 2018
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Frontiers Media SA in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience
- Vol. 12, 128
- https://doi.org/10.3389/fncel.2018.00128
Abstract
Animals can form associations between temporally separated stimuli. To do so, the nervous system has to retain a neural representation of the first stimulus until the second stimulus appears. The neural substrate of such sensory stimulus memories is unknown. Here, we search for a sensory odor memory in the insect olfactory system and characterize odorant-evoked Ca2+ activity at three consecutive layers of the olfactory system in Drosophila: in olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) and projection neurons (PNs) in the antennal lobe, and in Kenyon cells (KCs) in the mushroom body. We show that the post-stimulus responses in ORN axons, PN dendrites, PN somata, and KC dendrites are odor-specific, but they are not predictive of the chemical identity of past olfactory stimuli. However, the post-stimulus responses in KC somata carry information about the identity of previous olfactory stimuli. These findings show that the Ca2+ dynamics in KC somata could encode a sensory memory of odorant identity and thus might serve as a basis for associations between temporally separated stimuli.Keywords
Funding Information
- Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (01GQ0931)
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SPP1392)
This publication has 85 references indexed in Scilit:
- Cholinergic pesticides cause mushroom body neuronal inactivation in honeybeesNature Communications, 2013
- Layered reward signalling through octopamine and dopamine in DrosophilaNature, 2012
- Mechanisms of specificity in neuronal activity-regulated gene transcriptionProgress in Neurobiology, 2011
- Specific Dopaminergic Neurons for the Formation of Labile Aversive MemoryCurrent Biology, 2010
- Sparse odor representation and olfactory learningNature Neuroscience, 2008
- A Presynaptic Gain Control Mechanism Fine-Tunes Olfactory BehaviorNeuron, 2008
- Lateral presynaptic inhibition mediates gain control in an olfactory circuitNature, 2008
- Sensory processing in the Drosophila antennal lobe increases reliability and separability of ensemble odor representationsNature Neuroscience, 2007
- Excitatory Interactions between Olfactory Processing Channels in the Drosophila Antennal LobeNeuron, 2007
- Molecular, Anatomical, and Functional Organization of the Drosophila Olfactory SystemCurrent Biology, 2005