Illuminating Vertebrate Olfactory Processing

The olfactory system encodes information about molecules by spatiotemporal patterns of activity across distributed populations of neurons and extracts information from these patterns to control specific behaviors. Recent studies used in vivo recordings, optogenetics, and other methods to analyze the mechanisms by which odor information is encoded and processed in the olfactory system, the functional connectivity within and between olfactory brain areas, and the impact of spatiotemporal patterning of neuronal activity on higher-order neurons and behavioral outputs. The results give rise to a faceted picture of olfactory processing and provide insights into fundamental mechanisms underlying neuronal computations. This review focuses on some of this work presented in a Mini-Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2012.