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Stereotopy versus stochasticity in olfaction

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 147–149 (2014)Cite this article

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Although projections from the insect antennal lobe to the mushroom body are probabilistic, those to the lateral horn are stereotyped, suggesting an interplay of preconfigured and plastic circuits in olfactory processing.

Olfactory sensory neurons present odor information to the brain by activating specific combinations of glomeruli in the antennal lobe or its vertebrate counterpart, the olfactory bulb. These brain areas reformat odor-evoked activity patterns and broadcast them to multiple higher brain areas by way of second-order neurons. Target neurons in higher brain areas are thought to extract information about features of olfactory stimuli from the activity across subsets of second-order neurons. Thus, higher olfactory processing depends critically on the convergence patterns of second-order onto third-order neurons and on the mechanisms by which third-order neurons integrate synaptic inputs.

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Figure 1: Schematic organization of connectivity between the antennal lobe, lateral horn and mushroom body.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel, Switzerland

    Rainer W Friedrich, Anastasios Moressis & Thomas Frank

  2. Rainer W. Friedrich is also at the University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.,

    Rainer W Friedrich

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  1. Rainer W Friedrich
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  2. Anastasios Moressis
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Correspondence to Rainer W Friedrich.

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Friedrich, R., Moressis, A. & Frank, T. Stereotopy versus stochasticity in olfaction. Nat Neurosci 17, 147–149 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3630

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