During food intake flavor perception results from simultaneous stimulation of the gustatory, olfactory and trigeminal systems. Olfactory stimulation occurs mainly through the retronasal pathway and the resulting perception is often interpreted as a taste perception, thus leading to the well-known sensory confusion between taste and olfaction. The present experiment was designed to study, with f...

This review intends to integrate recent data from the Drosophila olfactory system into an up-to-date account of the neuronal basis of olfaction. It focuses on (1) an electron microscopic study that mapped a large proportion of fruitfly olfactory sensilla, (2) large-scale electrophysiological recordings that allowed the classification of the odor response spectra of a complete set of sensilla, (...

Spikes were evoked in rat olfactory sensory neuron (OSN) populations by electrical stimulation of the olfactory bulb nerve layer in pentobarbital anesthetized rats. The latencies and recording positions for these compound spikes showed that they originated in olfactory epithelium. Dual simultaneous recordings indicated conduction velocities in the C-fiber range, around 0.5 m/sec. These spikes a...

The oriental fruit fly, Bactrocera dorsalis, is a serious pest of fruits and vegetables. Methyl eugenol (ME), a male attractant, is used to against this fly by mass trapping. Control effect may be influenced by learning, which could modify the olfactory response of the fly to this attractant. To collect the behavioral evidence, studies on the capability of this fly for olfactory learning are ne...

Adaptation is a general property of sensory receptor neurons and has been extensively studied in isolated cell preparation of olfactory receptor neurons. In contrast, little is known about the conditions under which peripheral adaptation occurs in the CNS during odorant stimulation. Here, we used two-photon laser-scanning microscopy and targeted extracellular recording in freely breathing anest...

BACKGROUND Olfactory receptors work at the interface between the chemical world of volatile molecules and the perception of scent in the brain. Their main purpose is to translate chemical space into information that can be processed by neural circuits. Assuming that these receptors have evolved to cope with this task, the analysis of their coding strategy promises to yield valuable insight in h...