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On the scents of smell in the salamander

Nature volume 417, pages 336–342 (2002)Cite this article

Abstract

Our sense of smell is based on a remarkable chemical-detection system that possesses high sensitivity, broad discriminability and plastic, yet stable, function. Understanding how olfactory stimuli translate into perception is a problem of daunting complexity. How do odour-coding events in single cells correlate with emergent properties from the ensemble, and with behaviour? For comprehensive descriptions of neural function, analysis must extend from examination of how elemental principles relate to the function of the whole. The tiger salamander has long been used as an experimental model in studies of olfaction, enabling general questions about olfactory function to be approached.

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Figure 1: The optical illusion of the impossible triangle illustrates how reductionist dissection to component parts can, in some cases, fail to capture global properties of the whole.
Figure 2: The salamander olfactory pathway.
Figure 3: Attributes of salamander olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs).
Figure 4: Correlation of zonal distribution of defined receptor types with receptive fields, single units and distributed signals.
Figure 5: Schematic diagram of spatial and temporal combinatorial coding hypothesis assembled from many different data gathered from the salamander preparation, augmented with information from other preparations (for reviews, see refs 16–18).

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Acknowledgements

Work described in this paper has been generously supported by grants from the NIH (NIDCD), the Office of Naval Research, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The studies on the olfactory pathway arising from work in my laboratory have been carried out by many highly skilled, insightful colleagues, including K. Hamilton, A. Cinelli, M. Schwartz Levey, J. White, D. Wellis, K. Dorries, T. Bozza, J. Marchand, T. Alkasab and M.-C. Cheung. I thank B. Talamo and J. White for helpful suggestions on the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Neuroscience, Tufts University School of Medicine, 136 Harrison Avenue, Boston, 02111, Massachusetts, USA

    John S. Kauer

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Kauer, J. On the scents of smell in the salamander. Nature 417, 336–342 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/417336a

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