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Dark matter of the bulb

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 485–487 (2014)Cite this article

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A study now shows that granule cells deep in the olfactory bulb exhibit wildly different response dynamics depending on behavioral state, suggesting they could configure network changes across behavioral states.

The olfactory system is under constant assault from an ever-changing mix of volatile molecules that waft through the air, impinging on the nasal mucosae with each new inhalation, yet the brain effortlessly extracts the relevant signals to guide behavior. The nervous system solves this task in part by dynamically tuning the olfactory bulb, the earliest olfactory processing network in the CNS, rendering it dependent on factors such as the wakefulness of the animal, the hedonic value of the incoming odorants and the recent history of odor stimulation (for review, see ref. 1). Flexible sensory information processing is thought to be mediated by extensive feedback projections to the olfactory bulb from cortex and subcortical neuromodulatory nuclei2,3,4. In particular, the granule cells, an extensive network of inhibitory neurons deep within the bulb, integrate inputs from nearly all of these centrifugal projections and are thought to orchestrate bulbar dynamics across behavioral states. Although they have been the subject of many theoretical models of bulbar processing5,6, relatively little is known empirically about the function of granule cells in vivo. A study by Cazakoff et al.7 in this issue of Nature Neuroscience opens a window into the deepest layers of the bulb by characterizing, for the first time, the odor- and breathing-related activity of individual granule cells in awake mice.

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Figure 1: A partial schematic of the olfactory bulb.

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  1. Sasha Devore and Dmitry Rinberg are at the NYU Neuroscience Institute, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, New York, USA.,

    Sasha Devore & Dmitry Rinberg

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  1. Sasha Devore
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Correspondence to Dmitry Rinberg.

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Devore, S., Rinberg, D. Dark matter of the bulb. Nat Neurosci 17, 485–487 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3684

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