15:30 - 17:00
Fri-P2
Planck Lobby & Meitner Hall
The primacy model and the structure of olfactory space
Fri-P2-077
Presented by: Sergey Shuvaev
Hamza Giaffar 1, Sergey Shuvaev 1, Dmitry Rinberg 2, 3, Alexei A. Koulakov 1
1 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724, United States, 2 Neuroscience Institute, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, NY 10016, United States, 3 Department of Physics, New York University, New York, NY, United States
Understanding sensory processing relies on establishing a consistent relationship between the stimulus space, its neural representation, and perceptual quality. In olfaction, the difficulty in establishing these links lies partly in the complexity of the underlying odor input space and perceptual responses. Based on the recently proposed primacy code for concentration invariant odor identity representation and a few assumptions, we have developed a theoretical framework for mapping the odor input space to the response properties of olfactory receptors. We analyze a geometrical structure containing odor representations in a multidimensional space of receptor affinities and describe its low dimensional implementation, the primacy hull. We propose the implications of the primacy hull for the structure of feedforward connectivity in early olfactory networks. We test the predictions of our theory by comparing the existing receptor-ligand affinity and connectivity data obtained in the fruit fly olfactory system.